


The Rise and Fall of the First Order: An Oral History

by lookninjas



Series: Children's Work [28]
Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-24
Updated: 2019-06-24
Packaged: 2020-05-18 17:07:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 36,523
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19338859
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lookninjas/pseuds/lookninjas
Summary: To say that the strange story of the First Order transfixed the nation would be a deep exaggeration.  As dramatic as it was -- the missing teen scions of prominent Detroit families, the cult in its hidden compound, the escapes and the standoff and the shocking trials that followed -- it remained a primarily local tragedy for years.  Yet there was something in it that haunted the edges of the American consciousness, something we still have yet to exorcise.  Twenty years later, RS sits down with the primary players and some never-before interviewed sources to find out what how it happened, what went wrong, and what we have yet to learn from the rise and fall of the First Order.





	The Rise and Fall of the First Order: An Oral History

**Author's Note:**

> I went back and forth on whether or not to use the archive warnings on this one (because of the narrative distance imposed by the oral history format), but in the end decided to err on the side of caution. If you've read the preceding fics in this series, you probably can guess what the warnings are for. If you haven't and you're curious for whatever reason, I'm the same name here and on tumblr; go ahead and shoot me an ask and we can talk about it. But there's nothing in this fic that hasn't been mentioned before, warnings-wise. Just a different take on it.

_[Back row, from left to right: Mon Mothma, Brendol Hux, Armitage Hux, Benjamin Organa, Han Solo, Charles “Chewie” Gasco, Jyn Erso, Titania Phasma._

_Middle row: Dopheld Mitaka, Desiree Mitaka, Thomas Child, Marnie Plutt, Miles Statura, Jamie Shelton, Jonette Armstrong._

_Front row: Maz Kanata, Luke Skywalker, Kes Dameron, Poe Dameron, Finn Banneret, Rey Organa, Lando Calrissian.]_

_To say that the strange story of the First Order transfixed the nation would be a deep exaggeration. As dramatic as it was -- the missing teen scions of prominent Detroit families, the cult in its hidden compound, the escapes and the standoff and the shocking trials that followed -- it remained a primarily local tragedy for years. Yet there was something in it that haunted the edges of the American consciousness, something we still have yet to exorcise. Twenty years later, RS sits down with the primary players and some never-before interviewed sources to find out what how it happened, what went wrong, and what we have yet to learn from the rise and fall of the First Order._

 

**I. Snoke**

 

_He claimed he was born in Houston, Texas in 1914. He claimed to be the son of a charismatic radio preacher, a follower of Aimee Semple-McPherson and a friend of A.A. Allen. At times, he claimed he could see the future, heal the sick, speak in tongues; at others, he renounced all those things as hysterical nonsense. In the end, none of it was true, but then in the end, the truth didn’t matter. What mattered was power. And Snoke could never have enough._

**Jyn Erso [journalist, Pulitzer Prize Winner for the Palpatine Papers, author of _Dark Architects -- Palpatine, Snoke, and the Decay of a Nation_ ]:** Snoke’s father was from Kansas, originally. He moved north to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan to find work in the copper mines. It turned out mining wasn’t really for him, so he turned to bootlegging instead. Prohibition in Michigan had actually started earlier than it did in the rest of the country, in 1918. Obviously, though, you weren’t going to stop the miners drinking if they wanted to. The mines were already starting to pass their peak by then, so there were plenty of places to hide stills, and of course you had higher quality product moving across Lake Superior from Canada. The merchandise is there, the buyers are there. So Rudy Snoke does quite a good business for a number of years, flying largely under the radar the whole time.

In 1922, he meets this young woman, Annie Hesse, who is very religious, and immediately undergoes an immediate transformation. He gives it all up, or at least he claims to; they marry, and a year later Randolph Augustus Snoke is born, who was the couple’s only child.

From the start you have him being from this kind of strange mixed background, where on the one hand his father is very much a criminal and in fact never stops -- he outsources a lot of the work to other people to keep his own hands seemingly clean, but he’s always involved to some degree -- and then his mother is from this very strict Catholic background, and is a very devout and very pious person. And I wouldn’t say that he attempts to reconcile the two so much; I think that’s painting him in much too kind a light. But he definitely sees a potential in his mother’s faith that his father didn’t, so much. To his father, it was just an inconvenience to be overcome. But Snoke saw a profit there. Especially when the Great Depression started, and the mines closed, and things started to get desperate, he saw that there were two businesses that still made some money. And one of those was the bars, and then the other was the church. His father exploited one, but not the other. Snoke meant to exploit both.

And one of the other interesting things about his father is that it actually winds up giving him a connection to Han Solo later on -- one of the men that Rudy Snoke hired to maintain his businesses was a man named Jerboa Hutt. And his family made their way from the Upper Peninsula to Cheboygan county, just south of the Mackinac Bridge, and had a lot of property around Indian River. They had a trailer park where they leased lots out, and owned the local bars, owned the convenience stores, a pizza place -- just all these things, and Han Solo’s parents actually wound up in debt to them, which Han would later work to pay off. And Snoke was part investor in all these things, and spoke to them very frequently. He and Jabba Hutt were actually rather close for a while. So that gave him a source of information that helped him sort of put on that omniscient facade, later on, where he knew everything he could about Ben Organa and his family.

But in the early 1940s, Snoke moved to the Detroit area to attend Sacred Heart Theological School, which Luke Skywalker would also attend many years later. He doesn’t quite complete his degree, although it’s hard to say exactly why. In fact, he sort of drops off the map for many years, until the 1960s, where suddenly he’s leading tent revivals in Topeka, Kansas. Snakes and faith healing and speaking in tongues, the whole nine yards. Presumably this is about when he met Sheev Palpatine, who was still the Senator from Kansas at this time. And then by 1972, he’s turned into this Oxford graduate and a doctor of divinity who is Palpatine’s spiritual advisor, because Palpatine was terribly worried about being seen as irreligious at the time. Which he was, but with the evangelical movement picking up steam among conservatives, it wasn’t safe to be irreligious anymore. So he recruited Snoke, and that became Snoke’s third hustle. He had his father’s sort of organized crime connections, he had his various little cults that he’d start up, and then he had politics, which was really the best of both worlds for him.

_[Image: Sheev Palpatine gives a speech in Topeka, Kansas. Randolph Snoke is in the background.]_

**Mon Mothma [former editor, _Detroit Free Press_ ]:** I first remember seeing Snoke around that time. He didn’t come forward and speak publicly about who he was or what he was doing for the Palpatine administration, just lurked in the background in photo ops and speeches. He didn’t strike me as being especially interesting, honestly. I figured he was a crook -- all of them were. But with everything else going on in the Palpatine administration, and then the deaths of Galen Erso and Orson Krennic and things quite literally starting to explode, Snoke very much ceased to matter.

 **Jyn Erso:** So the Palpatine administration falls apart, totally. People are imprisoned. People are dead. Careers go up in smoke. It’s a terrible, terrible tragedy. And about five years later, at the beginning of the Reagan administration, this book comes out called _Decay of a Nation_ , and there’s Snoke again. He sort of bided his time until people were feeling nostalgic for Palpatine, which happened way too quickly, and then immediately cashed in. And it didn’t get him back in that same kind of position of power, but it did establish him as this sort of elder conservative voice. Sort of a William Safire figure. And more books come out, and he’s a guest on talk radio, and he goes to all the important events, and is very established in the religious right.

 **Brendol Hux [U.S. House of Representatives, 1998-2000]:** I remember before I’d become the D.A. for Lenawee County -- before I’d even thought of it really, people were telling me, “Oh, this is who you need to know. If you want to go anywhere, politically, you’ll need Snoke on your side.” And he really did seem to know everyone, to have everyone’s ear. You go from being a complete unknown to having all these donors, all this support, seemingly overnight. Incredible.

 **Jyn Erso:** And on top of all of this, suddenly he has these degrees in history in addition to all the degrees in theology and divinity, and the next thing you know he’s head of the history department at Cranbrook.

 **Luke Skywalker [Cranbrook professor, son of Anakin Skywalker, brother of Leia Organa, uncle of Ben Organa]:** It was tense, I will say that. To walk into that school, with him there, having known my father and been involved in all of that… It was tense. But he was surprisingly… I hate to say “respectful.” He really wasn’t at all. But he gave that appearance. He was very good at faking it. An excellent fraud.

 **Jyn Erso:** And so he really had this excellent life. He had the status. He had influence. He had quite a bit of money, from his own cons, from his father’s smuggling, and then also from the books and from his friends in the Republican Party. And if he’d kept it there, he’d have died fabulously rich and very powerful, and for most of us it would’ve been enough.

But it wasn’t enough for him. And so that’s where the First Order comes in.

 

**II. The First Order**

 

_[Image: Dopheld and Desiree Mitaka, June 1996]_

**Dopheld Mitaka [former First Order member]:** My wife was an addict. We’d struggled to manage it over the years, and I thought it was under control, but right around the time our daughter turned one, she relapsed again. She wasn’t around really at all, and when she was, it was… it was bad. I couldn’t leave her alone with Desiree, but I had to work, or we’d lose the house, and it was just overwhelming. I was angry a lot. It was a very difficult time. And then a coworker of mine who I was friendly with told me about this men’s support group he’d heard of, called the First Order. Kind of a faith-based thing, this Biblical thing. He said he thought they could help me. And at that point, I would’ve tried literally anything. So I went to my first meeting.

 **Jyn Erso:** The First Order started off as something very like the Promise Keepers. Men got together, talked about their lives, their families, their struggles, but with this specific religious and political and honestly patriarchal bent to it. The man was the leader of the household, the women and children were expected to submit, that kind of thing. But phrased very carefully of course, and introduced very slowly.

 **Dopheld Mitaka:** I didn’t notice so much of that, really, the patriarchy stuff. But there was a lot of talk about control, which always made me feel really terrible, because I felt so out of control in my own life and in my family. It was sort of “Look, every family is a team and every team has a captain, and your family needs you to take that captain’s role” but I couldn’t do that. My wife wasn’t even talking to me at that point, if she was even home. And then one day, after meeting, Snoke sits me down and said that sometimes the best way to control a situation was to let go. To stop fighting my wife’s addiction for her, let her go off in her own direction, and focus on protecting my daughter and building a good life for her. And if my wife came back, she came back, but if she didn’t, then that was between her and God. But my responsibility was to the person I could protect. And that meant a lot to me, actually. That really changed a lot of things. One of the other First Order members lived near me, Lyndsay Child, and his wife Mary was willing to watch Desiree while I worked, so she would be safe and cared for. Things started to settle down. I felt a lot of improvement in my life.

And then Snoke came to me and said that he was struggling on his own. That the First Order was starting to take up too much of his time, with his other commitments, and he needed someone to handle the daily operations -- arranging spaces for the meetings and organizing members for projects and handling finances because we’d started to take in some money at that point, things like that. It would pay, of course, more than I was making. I could do it from home to start, so I could have Desiree with me whenever I liked and worked the hours that felt best to me. It was quite an offer, and of course I was already so grateful to him. So I said yes.

 **Jyn Erso:** When you go back and you look at the legal documents, it actually looks like Dopheld Mitaka was running the First Order all on his own. And of course, he wasn’t. But Snoke was careful to structure it that way. He’d learned that from his father. Hide it behind someone else.

 **Dopheld Mitaka:** I never made any of the decisions, not really. He told me what he needed and I made it happen. It was never anything… At the start, it was all just rental contracts and making sure we had refreshments. Snoke told me to buy paper cups and napkins and I bought them.

It was so small until it wasn’t. Suddenly we had different groups meeting -- I was running meetings, the Wednesday ones. Lyndsay had a group he took care of. There were retreats. People were bringing their families. It started to become its own little church. There were Sunday services.

I can’t say exactly when it got so out of control. I think… I think of it like the whole frog in the boiling water. By the time I noticed, it was already way too late. But I remember when Plutt came in, and kind of thinking that that wasn’t good. That it wasn’t a good thing.

_“Uncle” Roger Plutt came from a relatively liberal Lutheran family, but by the mid-1990s, his views had changed drastically. There was no wishy-washy, “we’re all on the same team” rhetoric in Plutt’s household. He was in charge. The women in his family would mind their place. Or else._

**Marnie Plutt:** He was clean. I know that sounds ridiculous, but I’d never dated anyone that clean before. Under the fingernails, you know, and his shirts were always buttoned all the way down. He didn’t have tattoos. That was new to me. Called people “sir,” “ma’am.” Pulled out chairs. I wasn’t used to that. They say that’s how it starts. It doesn’t start bad. It just ends there. I wanted Rey to have someone in her life that would teach her the right things. I wanted her to have a good dad. He seemed like he would be. He was tough, but that’s what people say you’re supposed to do, as a parent. Be tough. I couldn’t do it. Never dated anyone who could. And we could have a real house, then. And not be so worried about money all the time. And just…

I mean there isn’t a good reason, really, just a lot of bad ones. But I loved him anyway. I did love him. Once you start that, it’s pretty hard to stop.

_[Image: Marnie and Roger Plutt at a First Order service, about 1997]_

**Rey Organa [former First Order member]:** I was pretty young when they first met. I don’t remember much about it now, but I remember I didn’t like him. Even from the start. Mom always had boyfriends, but he was different. He had a lot of rules that didn’t make sense to me at all. But I couldn’t argue with him, or he’d tell me I was going to Hell. And then he’d make the rest of my life Hell, just to prove the point.

 **Marnie Plutt:** It started with him wanting me not to work, which I hadn’t wanted to anyway. He said I didn’t need makeup, which was harder, but he made me feel like I was pretty, the way he said it. He wanted to go to this church, first a different one and then the First Order, and that was all right. He didn’t want Rey reading certain things and that made sense. Like I said, it started good. And then it went bad. And by then I didn’t know how to stop.

 **Rey Organa:** She always had an excuse for him. I remember that. It didn’t take long for me to realize that she’d always take his side over mine. Part of me was furious about it. But part of me thought, well, maybe if my mom thinks he’s right, then he really is right. I started to buy into it a little bit. Started to think maybe I deserved it, a little bit.

_It’s possible Snoke would have brought Plutt into his inner circle regardless. Cynic though he may have been, Snoke knew a zealot when he saw one, and Plutt certainly had that quality in spades. But he had something else as well, something no one knew but Snoke himself. Snoke and Marnie Plutt._

**Marnie Plutt:** I never knew my dad. My mom said he’d been important once, but he was washed-up when he met her. She thought he was special, but he wasn’t. And then he left. I went through something pretty close with Rey’s dad, which was awful. I hated that, doing what she’d done. But anyway, before that, there was a lawyer that came one day. And he had some money for us -- not much, but a little. And that was when I learned my father’s name, and it was Anakin Skywalker.

 **Luke Skywalker:** I was with my father when he died. He mentioned, before that, that there was another, besides Leia and myself. He didn’t know much about it, really, but he had some contact with the mother and he was going to make sure she got something from him, and he didn’t want me interfering. I didn’t want his money; I didn’t need his money. Leia and I were well provided for; the Organas took good care of us. It hurt to think that he’d done to this woman what he’d done to our mother, but then I wasn’t there to judge him, just to help him let go. It seemed the best thing to do at the time was just to honor his wishes, and if anyone reached out afterwards, then I’d deal with that as it came. But no one ever did.

 **Marnie Plutt:** I didn’t really recognize the name or anything. You know, it just didn’t mean much. But then I met Roger, and we started going to services at the First Order at that point, and one day Supreme Leader wanted to talk to me -- I think this was right about when Roger and I were getting married -- and he said he knew my father. That he’d been a man of great potential but terrible luck, but that he thought things would change for my family soon. And he was glad I was with the First Order, because that meant I’d be included in all of it, and the rest of the family wouldn’t be that lucky.

_Marnie and Roger Plutt were married in November of 1997._

_Two months earlier, in September, a young man named Ben Organa had started at Cranbrook Academy, where Snoke taught history._

 

**III. Ben**

 

_[Image: Ben Organa poses near the Mackinac Bridge, September 1994]_

**Han Solo [Ben Organa’s father]:** I didn’t actually know real fear until the day Ben was born. He was a little early, so he was small, and the doctor put him in my arms and it was the most terrifying thing. He was so small and so important, and I knew without a doubt that I was going to be a complete fuckup as a father and the best thing to do would be to run. But I stayed. Somehow I talked myself into staying.

 **Kes Dameron [Family friend of the Organas]:** You know, all kids are peculiar and important in their own ways. Ben was very quiet, I would say. Almost somber. Serious, anyway. And curious. My wife, Shara, was Jewish -- I hadn’t converted at that point; I didn’t until after she left us. But he had a lot of questions about that, about how that worked. I worried it would drive her crazy, but she loved him. She’d sit with him for an hour and just take him through things, very patiently.

 **Luke Skywalker:** If I happened to be there at the same time Shara was, he’d want to sit us both down for interrogation. Or he’d run back and forth between us. He wanted to know which of us was right and which of us was wrong, which kids tend to do. They want a really simple answer. But neither Shara nor myself saw it that way -- we figured we could both be right, or at least as close as anyone human ever comes. You can’t really explain that to a four year-old, but we tried.

 **Kes Dameron:** My wife died when Poe was eight. Ben was about four then, I think. Four or five. After the funeral, the Organas came to sit with us for a while -- we weren’t exactly sitting shiva; I didn’t really know how to do it. Like I said, I hadn’t converted then. But they sat and talked for about an hour, and then it was time for them to go, and Ben announced that he wasn’t going. He said he’d prayed about it and God wanted him to stay with Poe, and that was what he was going to do. My wife always used to say that God has no hands but ours, and Ben actually kind of paraphrased her on that. That he had to stay with Poe because God didn’t have hands but he did. It was very strange. A good strange, I think, in the end, but very strange.

 **Luke Skywalker:** I knew he was very sad about Shara, who he’d loved very much. It made sense to me that he’d want to be with Poe and Kes, for comfort as much as anything else. But he was really clear that this was about taking care of Poe and Kes and Shara’s sister, Vanessa, and not about himself. And his actions bore it out. He actually took very good care of them, not just for a four year-old but for anyone.

 **Poe Dameron [lawyer, Ben Organa’s husband]:** He read to me. I was really into the Hardy boys then, and he read to me every night. A couple of the words were hard for him, but not many. You know he was just always by my side. If I was angry, or crying, or… anything. He was super patient, and he isn’t always, but he was then. It’s still I think pretty much the kindest thing anyone’s ever done for me.

 **Han Solo:** You know, he was just like that as a kid. He’d come home with no coat and you’d ask him what happened and he’d say he prayed about it and someone else had needed it more. Or he’d eat half the refrigerator because God wanted him to give his lunch away and he’d been hungry ever since. You couldn’t watch the news with him at all. Any bad thing happening, he wanted to fix it. He wanted to make sandwiches and take them to Africa. I mean some people talk to God and God tells them to kill people. Ben just wanted to help.

 **Ben Organa [former member of the First Order]:** I just felt like such a terrible person, when I was young. Like I knew that there were good people and bad people, and I desperately wanted to be good. But I didn’t feel like I was. I felt like I was very very bad. Not like I was naughty, or I’d get coal, but… Like an evil, bad person. But I wanted to be good, so I prayed pretty much constantly for God to make me good, because that was how I’d decided it worked. And then when I did have an idea that might help someone or make them feel better, I decided that God had given me that idea because I prayed. I never felt like God had made me a better person; I think probably even at the time I had some kind of depression or something that made that impossible. But it did seem like He was helping me to do good things, and if that was all I could have, I was willing to accept it.

I did try to stop wanting to be good so much, when I started high school. I was in sort of a strange place, because I was just a little bit younger than everyone else. At Cranbrook you’d have eleven year-olds in high school classes, kids well beyond their years. I wasn’t a prodigy -- I was just young. The only thirteen year-old in the grade. And I was starting to realize that one of the things that set me apart from other kids my age was that I was gay, and that was hard. And then things got weird with my family, and Mom running for office, and things coming out about my dad, and I was just really angry a lot. And then I had my crush on Hux, so I wanted to impress him, and it was just…

But mostly even then I wanted to be good. I wasn’t happy about it. But I did think, a lot, that if I was a good person these things wouldn’t be happening. And that my family would be happy, and I would be happy, if I was good.

But I just wasn’t. And all the prayer in the world wasn’t making me good. And that was really hard.

_[Image: Ben Organa and Armitage Hux, May 1998]_

**Armitage Hux [former member of the First Order, U.S. House of Representatives 2017 -- present]:** He was definitely weird. Not weirder than me, I’d say, but weird enough for most people.

We hung around the same sort of group of people. Mostly kids whose parents were in politics somehow. Neither of us really fit. My family didn’t move to Grosse Pointe until I was thirteen, so I was too new, and then Ben had known those people forever and so had this sort of reputation as being the weird one. But he wasn’t shallow. I liked that about him. It felt like other people -- I mean not to sound like midwestern Holden Caulfield, but it did feel like some of the people in that school and in that group particularly could be very shallow, and he wasn’t. Very earnest most of the time, but then he could be funny, too.

It was Snoke’s idea for me to seek him out, though; it wasn’t really mine. I’d known Snoke most of my life at that point. I guess he was a sort of mentor, or at least he was meant to be. Dad liked him quite a bit. I hadn’t really made my mind up about it, but I certainly didn’t think he was this awful person, just old and boring and kind of clueless. But he said he thought I should try to make friends with Ben, which felt very strange to me. Touchy-feely wasn’t his way. Skywalker I would’ve expected it from, but not Snoke.

But I did like Ben, that was what surprised me. He wasn’t shallow or insincere; you knew where you stood with him. He could be funny when he tried. A little mean sometimes, but in a funny way. But then he could also be very kind, too. Especially to some of the younger students; I remember that. And he was young, too, but then you had the twelve year-olds and eleven year-olds, kind of very out of their depth. He showed them a lot of respect that older kids didn’t.

And he had that massive crush on me. Which was flattering. I don’t think anyone had had a crush on me before -- like I said, I was new and I was weird, and I had this stupid accent and just stuck out like a sore thumb. So that was nice, too.

And then of course Snoke wanted me to introduce the two of them, which solved the mystery of why he’d been so keen on me befriending Ben in the first place. And then again it didn’t at all. He could’ve introduced himself, but he didn’t. Of course that wasn’t how he did things, but I didn’t know that then. Everything had to be handled by someone else. Never got his hands dirty.

 **Ben Organa:** I knew a little who Snoke was. I knew he’d known my grandfather, and he wrote books, and he was a Republican and my mom really didn’t like him at all. But he was also a teacher, Hux knew him, no one at school seemed to think there was anything wrong with him. So I assumed he was safe. Just like everyone else did.

We shook hands the first time we met. I remember that so clearly. I remember touching his hand and feeling this… People usually describe those moments as being “electric,” like an electric shock, but they mean it in a good way. As a positive thing. This wasn’t that at all. This was fear. Revulsion. On a very bone deep level. I can’t pretend I didn’t know what he was. At the core of me, I absolutely did.

At the same time, I didn’t trust myself. I didn’t trust my own judgment. I never had. Everyone around me treated him like just another teacher. Even on my best days, I thought I was overreacting. On my worst days, which were more and more frequent, I figured the evil in me was reacting to the good in him. Like demons being cast out. I don’t even know where that came from, now. No one in my family believed in that kind of thing. But I did, or I was starting to.

So I kept going back to talk to him. Trying to figure it out, trying to make sense of it all. Trying to get my reactions back into the range of normal, or whatever. It never worked. Even at the end, I never wanted him to touch me. My skin always crawled, every time, no exceptions. But I did it anyway.

I can’t really explain it, I guess. I understand, or at least I understand more than I used to, but I can’t really explain it at all.

 **Luke Skywalker:** It bothered me a little, Ben spending that much time with him [Snoke]. I didn’t feel like he was a good influence. But I never thought he was dangerous, no. I think, like everyone else, I had a level of faith in the system. If Snoke was a teacher at the school, he had to be safe, in a certain way.

And of course, Ben was careful in how he discussed it, too. We knew he spent time with Snoke, in the company of other people. Mostly Hux. No one knew how much time they spent alone together until much later.

 **Lando Calrissian [former Detroit City Council member, family friend of the Organas]:** I used to call Ben my little lie detector, when he was a kid. Because he could always tell when someone was up to no good. He wouldn’t want to be around them. He wouldn’t want to shake hands or hug them or have any kind of contact.

I asked him -- one of the last times we talked, actually -- if he really felt good about Snoke. And he kind of didn’t want to talk about it at first, but finally, he said, “Uncle Lando, I don’t really feel good about anything right now.” Which just broke my heart. And then he said that when he prayed with Snoke, that helped him feel a little better. Not necessarily because of Snoke, but something in the way he handled things helped Ben feel closer to God, and that helped. I think later I heard he gave Poe the same kind of story. Reassuring us that he didn’t really like Snoke that much, and at the same time giving us an excuse to keep seeing him.

I don’t know that I was ever completely satisfied, but I stopped pushing. Which I shouldn’t have done. Ben was very stubborn; Ben was Han and Leia’s child and he was going to do what he was going to do and we all knew that. At the same time, one of us should’ve pushed more. All of us, maybe.

But no one did, and there’s the tragedy right there.

 **Dopheld Mitaka:** Snoke and I never talked about what was happening with Hux or with Ben. I knew he had a Bible study going for some of the students at Cranbrook, but that he was grooming these students specifically to join the First Order was as much a surprise to me as it was to everyone else.

He was excited, though. You could tell something was about to happen. His sermons changed quite a bit. We had regular Sunday services by then. They started fairly typical, Bible verses and discussion and how to have a good family and be good to our families and our communities. Then it became more… global, I’d say. Israel came up a lot, and political things. All having to do with [the book of] Daniel, and Revelations. This apocalyptic thing. As we got closer to the year 2000, that started coming up a lot. This millenial strain in all of it.

And then we bought the property in Cement City, and people started to move there. And I started to have… mixed emotions, I guess. Because that’s what cults do, living all together. It worried me a little. And the Apocalypse thing, and the end of the world… I was skeptical of it. It seemed a little ridiculous, to be honest.

But he’d done so much for me. The First Order had done so much for me. And I didn’t really have anyone else. I’d left my job. My wife had the house; I was living with the people who watched my daughter, who were First Order members. There was no one else in my life. Literally no one at all, not even my family. The First Order was my family, at that point.

I was living with the Child family at that point: there was Lyndsay and Mary, and then Thomas was their son and he was a little younger than Desiree. They had two other children, Jeff and Nicole, who were even younger. I think Nicole was an infant, then. And we all sat down, the three of us adults, one night, to decide if we were moving to the First Order compound or not. I really didn’t want to. Lyndsay did. Mary was going to do what her husband said was right; that wasn’t ever a question. That was how their family operated, the way Snoke told them it should. Lyndsay made the decisions, and Mary fell in line. So really, it was between me and Lyndsay, and he’d become pretty devout by then. Pretty firm in supporting Snoke. I was the only one with any doubts.

I should’ve stayed behind. I should’ve stayed behind. I wish I had.

I sat in that living room and I thought -- if I stay behind, I lose absolutely everything I know. I’d have no place to stay. Snoke had been pressuring me to start working from the compound, and I was worried about what he’d do if I didn’t. If I’d lose my job and have nothing else to fall back on. And I was worried about losing him, and the respect he had for me -- he treated me like a father, in a lot of ways. Always checking in on me, making sure I had what I needed. Very caring. And then all the rest of my friends would be gone, sooner or later. They’d go to the Compound and Des and I would be on our own, entirely.

So I pulled her out of school and we packed up and moved to Cement City. And I’ve never regretted anything more.

 

**IV. The Election of 1998**

 

_1998 was a good year for regret. As First Order members -- including Roger and Marnie Plutt, and Marnie’s daughter Rey-of-Sunshine -- retreated to the compound in Cement City, the political scene in the outside world was heating up. And Snoke, operating through his usual series of proxies, was deeply involved in one particular election, the race between Leia Organa and Brendol Hux for the U.S. House of Representatives._

**Jyn Erso:** Brendol Hux had been considering the run for a while, but it was really Snoke who pushed the button for him. He started feeding information to Ed Woolf, who would later serve as Brendol Hux’s campaign chair, all about Han Solo’s past in Northern Michigan. Direct from the Hutts themselves, of course. The goal was to make it seem like Brendol had a moral imperative to run against Leia Organa. That by doing so, he was taking a stand. And it worked like gangbusters.

 **Brendol Hux:** I mean, it’s easy to blame it all on Snoke, but I was the one who took it all and ran with it. What I did was shameful. Absolutely inexcusable. There’s nothing I can ever do or say to make up for the damage I caused. Nothing at all.

What I will say is that absolutely everything I did felt right to me at the time. It felt moral. Like I was doing the right thing. And I say that not to justify anything, but to point out: you can absolutely be acting in a terribly evil fashion and feel like it’s right. The moment you let go of how your words, how your actions are affecting people -- the moment you decide not to care about those things, then you become capable of tremendous evil. When you decide that someone is so immoral that you no longer need to care what happens to them, you are capable of tremendous evil. Even if you believe that what you’re doing is for the greater good.

People need to remember that. I don’t think enough of us do. But we need to.

 **Mon Mothma:** Leia had announced her candidacy for the House seat in October of 1997. It seemed reasonable enough at the time. She was well-connected within the party. People remembered the Amidalas at least a little. They knew Bail Organa well. She had Lando Calrissian’s support, which was extremely important in the Detroit area. People knew her; they liked her. Her son was in high school, so presumably the election wouldn’t be as taxing on her or as much of a strain on the family as it might have been when Ben was younger. A female candidate was always going to be a longshot, but she had a better chance than most of the rest of us. There wasn’t really any thought of anyone challenging her for the nomination.

And then all hell broke loose.

_[Image: Detroit News headline, reading: Democrat Drug Shocker!]_

**Lando Calrissian:** We knew Han’s background was going to be an issue. I defended him on drug charges when he first got to Detroit! Everyone knew he had a record. Everyone knew this was going to be a problem.

I don’t think anyone expected it to get as vicious as it got. I mean, you’d have thought he was… I don’t know, El Chapo or somebody, the way people talked about him. He was a small-time weed dealer who got busted with less than twenty grams. In most states now that’s personal use. Even back then it was a misdemeanor. A weekend in jail, three months of probation, and it was over and done with.

But then there was all this stuff about the Hutts, all this “organized crime” and “selling to kids” bullshit -- I mean, pardon my language, but it was bullshit. “Selling to kids” -- he was a kid! He was sixteen when he started working for the Hutts. Of course he was selling on school grounds! That’s where kids buy weed, and especially up there. Have you been to Indian River? There really isn’t anything else up there. A couple of candy stores and a state park. A general store that sells guns and fishing lures out of the basement. I mean it’s the middle of nowhere.

But you take that, you spin it up, you combine it with Leia being a damn fine defense attorney -- who beat Brendol Hux handily on three separate occasions, which I’m sure had nothing to do with this -- and suddenly you have the Crime Candidate running on the Enslave Our Children With Drugs platform.

I’m still angry. I was angry then, and I’m angry now. Brendol at least has had the grace to recognize what he did and to apologize. But he wasn’t alone in this at all, and plenty of people are still active in Republican politics to this day, with the exact same rhetoric. It’s appalling.

 **Armitage Hux:** There would be weeks I wouldn’t speak to my father at all. And I was fairly callous as a boy, but even I knew this was beyond the pale.

I’d brought Ben over a time or two, but I stopped at that point. I mean, God only knew. Ben’s table manners weren’t up to my dad’s standards of propriety or something, and suddenly it’s front page news that he’s some kind of barbarian. Or if Dad noticed the way Ben looked at me sometimes, which I was very acutely aware of at that point. I started to get a bit angry at him about it, actually, which was deeply unfair of me. But I felt like he was going to ruin his life every time he looked at me, and I was terrified, and I didn’t know what to do.

 **Brendol Hux:** There was one bit of information I had that I never used, actually, and it was about Luke [Skywalker] being gay. Which even I felt was unnecessary, bordering on cruel. That to me had no relevance on the campaign. It was the one non-shameful thing I did, that year.

 **Han Solo:** Of course now it gets spun completely differently into this sort of Robin Hood thing, where the Hutts were forcing me into selling drugs and I had no choice, and that’s all bunk. I was a kid. It was the seventies. I smoked. If I sold a little on the side, I could afford to buy more, so I could smoke more. I bought from the Hutts to start off with because that was who you bought from. There wasn’t anyone else selling. And then, of course, I found some other people who were, and it was cheaper and a lot better quality, so I started buying from them instead. Hutts never really forgave me for that one. Hit a certain point and it was easier to drop out of school, hide out with Chewie, hope it blew over. Moved downstate eventually. Didn’t figure it would follow me the way it did. But I’d made bad enemies. Some people hold grudges better than others do.

It got hard coming down to breakfast. I couldn’t look Leia in the eye, couldn’t look Ben in the eye. I was ruining their lives. I hadn’t meant to, but I was anyway. Every little fear I’d had about not belonging in that world was coming back with a vengeance, and I couldn’t cope. I just fell apart. And then I hated myself for that, too.

It was a pretty hard time.

 **Ben Organa:** I hate to say it, but I really did blame my dad for a lot of it. My thinking was really black and white then anyway, and I was so rigid about good and bad, and I guess I thought that the bad parts of me had to come from somewhere, so…

It’s hard to think about now, how I was to him. It hurts a lot. He didn’t deserve any of it.

 **Jyn Erso:** The election was a total rout. Brendol Hux won in a landslide. I was actually in the room with Leia when she lost. I remember her saying, “Well. I guess this as bad it’s gonna get, right?” Trying to put a good face on it.

_[Image: Ben and Leia Organa, Christmas, 1998]_

**Ben Organa:** It was hard. Yeah, it was really hard.

For all I was weird about moral stuff a lot, I always knew my mom was a good person. I always knew she wanted the best for people, and wanted to help them. For her to lose like that was awful. I felt terrible for her.

 **Han Solo:** It felt like the kindest thing I could do for Ben and Leia was to let them go. It wasn’t. It was probably as stupid and selfish a thing as I’ve ever done in my life. But I did it anyway.

It felt like -- I’d always known I wasn’t good for them. And now I’d proved it. So I’d go live in exile like the overdramatic idiot I was. Chewie almost killed me for it. We had some fights, that’s for sure.

 **Kes Dameron:** Leia was optimistic he’d come back, but I had my doubts. I loved Han too, but he was so stubborn. Well, they both were. But you couldn’t say anything about it. Things were hard enough.

 **Armitage Hux:** Things were already going downhill with Snoke and Ben. They were spending more and more time together, and things were getting stranger and stranger. But Han moving out was really what tipped it over the edge. Ben was pissed at his dad, but he loved him, too. For Han to leave the family like that, when they needed him the most, it was pretty awful.

 **Charles “Chewie” Gasco [friend of Han Solo]:** Everyone lit into him for that one. Absolutely everyone. I think we just made it worse, though. Han already thought he wasn’t good enough for his family. You can’t scream someone into better self-esteem. It doesn’t work like that. So we all fucked that one up.

In the end, I don’t know if it matters that much. Ben might’ve had a little more protection from Snoke if his dad was still around. But if Snoke hadn’t been an evil son of a bitch, Ben wouldn’t have needed protecting. Snoke was actively in Ben’s head, messing with his mind. That’s what caused this.

 

**V. The Prophet Kylo Ren**

 

_[Image: Ben Organa, January 1999]_

**Ben Organa:** Snoke had this Bible study group going at Cranbrook, which Hux was part of. Which surprised me, because Hux was very openly an atheist. I think he actually used to say he was a “notorious” atheist. Which we always thought was hilarious, although I couldn’t tell you why anymore. But I think his dad wanted him to be part of it. His dad was really keen on him spending time with Snoke; they were already talking like Hux was going to be the next President or whatever. He was sixteen at the time. Seventeen, maybe. Hux fought with his dad a lot, but he also pretty much did what he was told most of the time. So he went to Bible study.

Obviously I wanted to do pretty much everything Hux was doing. But then I also really hadn’t been part of a faith community before. My parents didn’t go to church. Luke hadn’t gone to church for years. Grandpa Bail was a pretty firm Catholic, and I went with him sometimes, but I always felt a lot like an outsider. I think part of me really did want to have that sort of connection with people, on a spiritual level.

It didn’t work, really. Most of the kids were politicians’ children, like Hux and I were. Snoke was very influential, had influential friends, and of course Hux’s dad was in Congress, or was about to be at that point. My mom wasn’t doing so well but people still knew who she was. We’d met the Clintons and everything, which wasn’t necessarily a great thing at that point either, but it was still kind of… If you wanted to know the right people, that was where you wanted to be. But it was frustrating for me. I didn’t care about that. I was trying to work things out, how I felt about what was right and wrong and what God wanted me to do and what I wanted to do for God.

Snoke started to pull me aside for one-on-one conversations. Sometimes it would be discussions or debates, and we’d really argue from time to time. It wasn’t like Luke, where he has this very elliptical way of approaching things, more feelings-based. Snoke always had verses and things to counter the argument, which I actually liked. You had to do the homework to keep up with him, and if you could, then he wasn’t shy about praising you for it. And then the other thing was just prayer and meditation, which I found a little more stressful, but I was also familiar with that. Luke and I had done quite a bit of that as well.

I think the real tipping point, though, was a conversation we had at the beginning of my sophomore year, when I was fourteen. Up until then I’d kind of flattered myself that no one knew I had any kind of feelings for Hux. I thought I was pretty sneaky about it. And then honestly, too, I was very conflicted. I knew that Uncle Luke was gay, and I didn’t think he was a bad person, but he also had a really hard time and I didn’t know if I wanted that for myself. I’d never seen him with someone, ever. I knew he’d had a crush on a friend of his, like I had a crush on Hux, but it hadn’t gone anywhere. He’d been out to some extent when he was in California, but now he was back in Michigan and basically back in the closet. Some of the students at Cranbrook were assholes about it, sometimes directly to his face. Even when people defended him it was, “Oh, he’s not really gay, he’s just weird.” The way people talked about other students who were thought of as being gay, it was really awful. They were seen as being very aggressive, like leering in the locker room, things like that. People didn’t want to go near them. It was just such an awful thing to have to endure. It didn’t seem worth it. So I was very careful to keep things under wraps as best I could.

And then Snoke pulls me aside one day and says he’s worried about me. That he’s known Hux for years and he doesn’t want me to get hurt. That he watched my grandfather, Anakin, make the same mistake with his old mentor, that he wanted more than he could have and it tore them apart in the end. I was pretty freaked out. Mostly that Snoke knew. I didn’t want anyone to know. I didn’t really want to be gay at all, honestly, and it just felt like my life was going to be ruined.

Snoke told me to hand my problems over to God. To pray for help. Which I’d been doing for years, for other things, so it made sense to me. He said he’d help me if I wanted, and I said I did.

It’s hard to really… My mindset at the time was very strange. A lot was happening; my family was breaking up. I felt under attack a lot. I felt like a lot of it was my fault, too. I felt… I started believing in strange things. Supernatural things. Snoke definitely encouraged that. He used to talk about how he had unusual insight. How he knew things about people they themselves didn’t know. I started to tell myself -- I think in a lot of ways because I wanted to believe it -- that the only reason he knew about Hux was because he’d seen it in me. That he’d… read my mind isn’t a good way to put it, I guess, but that God had shown him. That God wanted him to reach out to me, just like He’d asked me to reach out to other people.

Snoke started talking about destiny a lot, about fate. That God had brought me to Hux for a reason, that Hux had brought me to Snoke for a reason. That Snoke was going to lead both of us to very great things. At first I thought it was just… politics stuff, like everyone else talked. But then it started getting stranger and stranger.

When we’d started, when I would pray around him, I’d be in sort of a corner of his office and he’d be doing something else. I’d be with him, but I had my own space carved out. That stopped happening so much. He’d come stand behind me, put his hand on my shoulder to check on me. Then he’d just stay there with his hand on me. Then he’d sit down behind me. Then he’d have his hands on my ribs so he could feel me breathing and tell me when I wasn’t breathing deep enough. Then his hands went lower. He sat closer. He’d have his legs on the outside of mine so our thighs were pressed together. Even when I wasn’t supposed to be meditating, he’d have his hand on my back, low. Not in front of people, but when we were alone. He’d touch the tops of my arms, or if we were sitting he’d have his hand above my knee. I’d tell myself I was making a big deal out of it because I was gay and I was projecting. Snoke was old and I was pretty sure he was straight or just asexual and not interested, so I told myself I was reading too much into it.

His big thing was going into the dark and the quiet. The dark behind the light and the quiet behind the sound. He told me that when I got there, I’d see things. That God would show me things. It was one thing when I was on the other side of the room and he was grading papers or whatever, but when he was pressed right up against me with his hands on my hips like that, I wanted to be anywhere else. Anywhere but there. So I started really actively trying to get to that place.

It was New Year’s Eve. Poe was back from college, and he’d come over. I was actually going to blow off bible study that night and just hang out with Poe, but being in the same room with him was really hard. I’d never had a crush on Poe the same way I had a crush on Hux; we’d known each other too long for that. Things happened so gradually that I didn’t realize they were happening. Then he was gone, at college, and then suddenly he’s back from break and he’s in my room on my bed, and I haven’t seen him for forever, and it just hit me all at once. I wanted to touch his hand. I wanted to put my head on his shoulder or maybe even kiss him. A very very big part of me wanted to just tell him everything that was going on, everything that was happening. I panicked. I didn’t know what to do. So I sent Poe home and I called Hux and told him I was going to bible study after all. He was surprised, and I think now probably a little disappointed. But he came and got me and we went. Towards the end, I went off with Snoke like we usually did. I sat down on the floor in his study, and he turned the lights off and then sat behind me, up close, hands on my sides. He was… He was hard. Like… his penis. Was erect. And I could feel it, and I remember thinking that no one would ever believe me. If he… If he raped me. I remember thinking that I wouldn’t ever even be able to tell anyone. That I wouldn’t even know how to fight back. I wasn’t a small kid, but I remember feeling very small, then, and helpless. And I didn’t want to be in my body anymore, if that was going to happen to me, and I couldn’t stop it. So I went somewhere else.

We’d been watching _The Twilight Zone_ , Poe and I. They do that all day thing on New Year’s Eve where they show it all, the whole series. In my head, I was walking around a ruined landscape -- like the one with the guy who’s reading in the bank vault. _Time Enough at Last._ Everything was over. Everything was dead. And I felt nothing about it. I didn’t feel happy or sad or afraid or anything. I felt nothing.

I come out of it and Snoke’s not behind me anymore. He’s in front of me, with his hands on my knees. Even in the darkness, his eyes were shining. He said, “You’ve seen it. What you were made to do. God has finally shown you.”

It’s easy to say, now, how it all came together. At the time, I couldn’t see it. It just felt like Snoke had to have been right about all of it. He’d told me I would see things and have visions and I had seen something, I had the visions. They were awful and I didn’t want them, but I figured at the time that was the point. God was testing me. And I guess if God wanted awful things, then I didn’t feel like I could fight Him on that, really. I’d always wanted God to teach me how to be good. I always felt like it would be hard. It didn’t seem that surprising that God would want something very different from what I would want.

And then there was the whole year 2000 thing, too. Which seems ridiculous now, and we even did joke about it back then, but at the same time there was this whole edge to it. That sort of a “what if” kind of feeling that’s so hard to explain. And just things like -- The whole _Left Behind_ thing, being so popular. This constant apocalyptic diet. It’s one of those things, I think, where you see it so much it just starts to seem plausible somehow. Even if you know better, when it’s that prevalent, it starts to get into your head.

Anyway, I kept seeing Snoke, after that. I kept having visions. I think after a while I started picking up on what made him happy, what he liked, what he didn’t. So I could see what he wanted me to see. Tell him what he wanted to hear. It was a complicated thing. I very much wanted to please him. To be what he wanted me to be, and by extension what God wanted me to be. I really did absolutely start thinking that God spoke to Snoke, and through Snoke.

At the same time, he absolutely touched me less when I got things right. When I had the right kinds of visions, and said the right things. He touched me less. When I guessed wrong, then he’d have to correct me, and that meant his hands on me, that meant his body pressed up against mine. He didn’t always have a physical response like he’d had on New Year’s Eve, but I expected it every time. That was the one thing I was most frightened of. That he was a physical man with physical lusts, but he also had such a power over me that I couldn’t fight him. That I wouldn’t know how. Sometimes I felt like I even sort of wanted it. That I was in a way asking for it.

I was so exhausted. It was just easier not to fight. In a way it felt like I’d been fighting all my life -- I was only fifteen, but it was still my whole life. I didn’t want to keep living that way. Everything just felt so inevitable at that point. Like no matter what I did, the world was going to end, so what was the point? It was easier to just do what Snoke said and trust that it would come out all right. So that was what I did.

I think it was around February that Snoke told Hux we were going to the First Order compound. Late February, close to when we left. He didn’t give Hux a lot of time to decide. I was there for some of their conversations. Not all. I wasn’t allowed. There were always things that were for Hux and then things that were for me. Even then.

 **Armitage Hux:** I think he gave me about a week to decide. One of his big things was that I was going to make my father proud. That my father had introduced me to Snoke for a reason, and this was it. Close to what he told to Ben, but in such a way that it seemed to me at the time that my father was in on the plan in the first place. That he knew, and approved.

Mostly I went for Ben, though. I knew he would go with or without me, and I wasn’t about to let him go without me. Someone needed to look after him. At that point, I was the only person I trusted. So I went.

 

**VI. The Missing**

 

 **Ben Organa:** Every year, students from Cranbrook take a trip to the Great Smokey Mountains, the sophomores do. Like a class bonding experience. I told everyone I was going, that I was excited. My dad took me out to buy camping stuff. He gave me his new phone number before we said goodbye. The night before, I stayed at my mom’s house. I knew it would be the last time I would see her for a long time. Maybe forever. Then Hux came to pick me up; I told her he was dropping me off at the school. We drove to Snoke’s house instead. Mitaka was waiting there.

 **Dopheld Mitaka:** Snoke told me that the future of the Order was waiting for me. All I had to do was pick them up and take them back to the compound. There was so much happening at that point that I’d had no idea about before. There was this whole building on the Compound that was just guns. Ammo. They had a shooting range. Terrifying things. Now I’ve got these two kids in the back of my car.

They held hands. I remember that. At one point Ben had his head on Hux’s shoulder. All I could think was just _lambs to the slaughter_. But I didn’t know how to turn back anymore. I was in so far over my head that I didn’t know which way was up.

 **Armitage Hux:** Ben put his head on my shoulder for a while. We held hands. It was emotional. It was hard for him to leave his mother. It was hard for him to lie to her. And then, too, he knew more of what Snoke had planned at that point than I did. I wasn’t seeing visions of the end of the world or anything, like he was. I didn’t know how dark it was going to get. Ben did.

 **Han Solo:** We knew the same day that something was wrong. The school called when Ben didn’t show up to get on the bus. Leia called me, and then we started calling everyone. He’d left with Hux, so Leia called Hux’s mother, Lucy. His dad was in D.C. at that point. We called him, too. We called the cops, which wasn’t really helpful. We had people just driving around -- Kes, Lando, Chewie, Luke. Hux’s parents’ friends. Everyone we knew, just driving around Detroit.

They found Hux’s car at Snoke’s house, in the driveway. He’d emptied the fridge, turned off utilities. Mail going to a P.O. Box. It was clear that something really, really bad had happened.

The police started to be more helpful after that.

 **Brendol Hux:** I was actually relieved for a minute, when I heard they’d found the car at Snoke’s. Snoke was a teacher. He was a spiritual man. It didn’t occur to me that he would hurt the boys at all. But that he’d abandoned the house like that, that he wasn’t coming home… I’d been a prosecutor a long while. I knew that was a bad sign. And I knew, or I ought to have known, that a lot of terrible people seem good at the start. They hide themselves, is all.

Every police officer I knew, every detective, every chief of anything. I lit up every phone. I got the same thing every other parent gets at first -- Hux was eighteen, kids do stupid things, we’d been fighting. One or two people suggested the boys had just run off together. I think Romeo and Juliet was brought up. But I’d been a prosecutor. People knew me. And then, too, I was in Congress and it gave me a certain pull.

It didn’t matter. They were already in Cement City by then, and no one was going to find them. But damned if I didn’t have everyone I could think of out there trying.

_[Image: Brendol Hux, Lucy Hux, Leia Organa, and Han Solo give a press conference, March 1999]_

**Maz Kanata [friend of Han Solo]:** By the time Han called me, Chewie had already started calling his people -- his parents, his brothers and sisters. Then they started calling each other, all the aunts and uncles and cousins. There’s a lot of Gascos in the area. A lot of Gascos. And they all started calling me, trying to organize something. Because that’s what I do; I organize things. So I started organizing. Leia faxed me a flyer with pictures of the boys and we got people out there looking. Not just our tribe [Maz and the Gasco family are both Little Traverse Bay Bands Odawa], but Sault Tribe [of Chippewa Indians] too. I got that running and then I went to see the Hutts. Kidnapping’s not their style -- honestly they were safe enough unless you did business with them. Or rented from them; they were terrible slumlords. But with Hux’s dad and Ben’s mom being in that election, and then obviously Brendol was getting information from the Hutts somehow, and now both boys are missing. And Hutts don’t mess with me. I hold my own.

Everyone I talked to said they didn’t know anything about it. But that if anyone _did_ know, it was this Snoke character. I started hearing things, like he’d been talking to [Michigan] Militia members. He’d been buying guns, or people were buying on his behalf. He’d gotten property somewhere remote, but no one knew where. Some people said in the U.P. Some people said Ohio or Indiana. There’s Klan in Indiana, bad people. But then there’s also bad people up here too. Like I said, a lot of militia, and they’re not really that different from the Klan. Different names. Same old assholes.

As a friend, you never want to give that kind of bad news. But I didn’t have a choice. If we were going to get the kids back, we needed to get it out there as soon as possible. So I passed it on, every bit of it. Then I prayed a while, for strength if nothing else. I knew we’d need a lot of strength.

 **Brendol Hux:** I was stunned when I heard. Definitely some hope slipped away at that moment. I really began to worry what I had gotten the children mixed up with.

_[Image: Detroit Free Press front page. Headline reads: Kidnapped! Pictures of Ben Organa and Armitage Hux underneath]_

**Mon Mothma:** We didn’t really give the DPD a choice about the story. I’d known Leia for years, and I knew Brendol a little. I didn’t like him much, but it didn’t matter. We went to DPD and said, “This is front page, Sunday paper. If there’s anything you don’t want in, then you need to tell us now. If you have a statement, we’re happy to print it. But this is going out whether you like it or not.” They gave a statement, we kept a few details out, some things that needed more time to verify, but by Sunday morning I’d say most everyone knew what was going on.

 **Kes Dameron:** I didn’t reach out to Poe immediately; I hoped we’d find Ben quickly enough that it wouldn’t be an issue. But when we realized Ben and Hux were with Snoke, and what that entailed, I knew it wasn’t going to be that easy. So I started calling him at school, but I couldn’t get in touch with him. His roommate said he’d track him down. Days went by. I think I started to panic a little bit. Ben was gone. Hux was gone. Now I couldn’t find Poe.

 **Poe Dameron:** I was in the library, mostly. Working on some stupid project. I mean, it wasn’t that stupid, but. Snap [Wexley, Poe’s roommate] and I were never in the apartment at the same time. I’d see his notes and think “Oh, yeah, call my dad” and then never do it. It never occurred to me that it could be anything that serious.

 **Lando Calrissian:** We all started calling at one point, just trying to get through. I was the one who finally did it. Poe had known Ben his whole life. They’d always been friends. Breaking the news that Ben was gone was one of the harder things I’ve ever done.

_[Image: Poe Dameron and Luke Skywalker speak to reporters, March 1999]_

**Poe Dameron:** It was devastating. It didn’t make sense. Ben had called me not that long before, talking about the camping trip and everything. He’d sounded -- I mean, not happy, but better than he had. I thought things were looking up. You look back, now, and he was going down the list, saying goodbye to everyone, but. At the time I just couldn’t reconcile it. I was so confused, scared, worried. And guilty. I kept thinking I should’ve seen it. I should’ve known. And there were some things that worried me, but I guess not enough.

I dropped everything to go home. Absolutely everything. Someone bought me a plane ticket -- I don’t think anyone ever said who, just to go to the gate and they’d figure it out from there -- and I packed up a bag and I was gone. Snap knew, obviously. No one else at Columbia did. I guess they figured it out eventually.

In retrospect, I’m kind of surprised my dad let me. He sacrificed a lot to get me to Columbia, and it was a big deal for the both of us when I got in. But none of that mattered with Ben out there lost. I had to help. I wasn’t ever going to sit behind and wait for someone else to help him. I had to be there in the middle. I’d do anything I could. Even if it was just passing out flyers. Talking to people. If they were doing something about it on the news, I’d be one of the people they interviewed -- they’d do the parents, you know, and then the worried friend, and Luke or Lando or someone. And I was always the worried friend. You know you’re playing a part, but I hoped it would help.

It seemed very imminent at the beginning. It didn’t occur to me that they could stay lost for that long. So many people were looking, and we were doing so much, and it just seemed that that had to be enough. I was very naive. Well, I was very young. I guess I’d been pretty sheltered, although it didn’t seem like that at the time. I didn’t know how hard some things really were.

It was a few days. Then it was a week. Then it was a month. I started feeling really helpless. Nothing was working. People stopped caring. We weren’t on tv anymore. We weren’t in the papers. I’d have nightmares. Ben was afraid of the dark when he was little and I used to imagine him in a dark place somewhere I couldn’t get to him, which I guess was more accurate than I knew. Sometimes I thought I heard him crying.

My mom used to tell me to look out for him, because he was little, younger than me. I always took it seriously. I guess I never realized how seriously I took it until he was gone, and then it just felt like I’d lost all my purpose.

It’s hard to explain, I guess. It was a very hard time. For all of us, not just me, but. Even for me. It was very hard.

 

**VII. The Compound**

 

 **Armitage Hux:** Mitaka drove us to this place sort of out in the middle of nowhere. I’d actually grown up not far from there, but this wasn’t any place I was familiar with. Sort of an old converted farm, with a lot of buildings. Snoke had a little house all his own, skinny and tall, with this attic. There were sort of rooming-house type places, with bedrooms. Ben and I shared a room. Some of the married couples had their own little shacks, but not everyone did. Some of the parents had their kids with them, but then there was this group house where most of the kids stayed during the day, and some of them slept there overnight. A church, of course. A cafeteria where we all took meals. I used to call it “Militia Summer Camp.”

I’d actually been pretty afraid of it coming in, but it didn’t seem so bad at first. I had little lessons with Snoke every day, history and great generals and leaders and then these sort of thought experiments, like designing my ideal government if this one collapsed, which I guess weren’t as hypothetical as I wanted to believe they were. Ben would meditate with him every day. He wanted us doing target practice. There was a fellow there who taught us to box, spar. That turned dark towards the end, but it wasn’t anything but just basic self-defense, at first. Church every night -- that turned dark too, obviously. Very apocalyptic. But most of it was just wandering around. I did a lot of reading. Like I said, Militia Summer Camp. Until it shifted.

I remember, though, that he changed Ben’s name right away. That was the peculiar one for me. I never did want to call him by that name. You had to, sometimes, or he wouldn’t answer. But he did answer to Ben for a good long while, or at least when I was alone with him he would. In public, thought, it was all Kylo, Kylo, Kylo. Kylo Ren.

 **Ben Organa:** There was this whole idea that Ben Organa had to die. That he wouldn’t be able to survive the future, what was going to happen. Which I both… I knew it, because I’d been seeing it, or thought I had. But there was still a sort of essential absurdity about it. I told myself I saw, and I told myself I believed, but I didn’t. Not really. This character of Kylo Ren, though, he believed. And sort of… Someone without my doubt. Without my guilt. Without my worries or fear or grief or any kind of essential weakness, which I saw all those things to be at the time. And not gay, obviously. That was a big one for me.

So that was the Prophet Kylo Ren, which I both did want to become and then deep down inside didn’t want to become, because that person frightened me so badly. But at the same time, you’re supposed to do things that frighten you, to grow. There’s so many small lessons that Snoke kind of exploited, in me. The idea of doing things that frighten you. The idea that goodness is supposed to be challenging, that it should sometimes even feel like a violation of your essential self, if that makes sense. Kind of a Calvinistic thing, that idea that sin is the wide, broad, easy path and that goodness is hard and rocky and narrow.

It was almost normal though, at first. I missed my mom, a lot, and I worried about her. But I had Hux, who was my best friend -- we were sharing a room, we spent a lot of time together. That was fun. We’d shoot and we’d hunt and there was a little pond to go fishing. A lot of the families there had children. They’d kind of follow us around. I guess we were older, so we were kind of cooler. My dad taught me how to shoot with an old bb gun, so I taught some of the boys how to shoot that way. That was how I met Rey, actually. She wanted to learn how to shoot like the boys did. She was, like, five. Tiny. This long hair and a little scarf over it and a denim skirt, and she was just very tough and smart and confident and I just thought she was the greatest. This little firecracker of a kid.

_[Image: Former First Order members Desiree Mitaka, Patience Lynch, and Jessa Lynn Sanchez, laughing. Rey Organa (white headscarf, denim skirt) is visible behind them.]_

**Rey Organa:** We were one of the first families on the compound. I hated it. I absolutely hated it. When some of the other kids came, it got better, but I wasn’t allowed around them very much. Their parents weren’t raising them right. The girls wore pants and things. They braided my hair a few times. I got in trouble for that, for having braided hair. Plutt used to say that someday he and the Supreme Leader would straighten everyone out. They’d put things into order and everything would be right.

Then we’re all at church one night and Snoke brings in Ben and Hux, and Plutt was just furious. He hated Ben. I think he was jealous. He’d thought one day Snoke would bring him in front of everyone as our new leader and in charge of everything, and instead there’s this Prophet Kylo Ren, who he doesn’t know and doesn’t like. I remember thinking, that night, that I was going to always like Kylo Ren and be very nice to him and be polite and do what he asked, mostly just because he made Plutt so angry, and Plutt was so awful to me. I was pretty spiteful, I guess, for a five-year old.

But then I did meet Ben, and he was genuinely kind to me. And he stood up for me, which no one else was doing. Hux too, I guess; they were kind of a unit at the start. They were always together. But Ben in particular would actually go and confront Plutt and argue with him about things. He wanted me to be able to learn. To be safe. To be happy. He was willing to fight for that. I’d never really had anyone in my life that fought for me. My own mother didn’t. Ben did.

I felt happy when he was around. I felt safe. I knew he couldn’t take care of me forever. But I wanted him to.

 **Ben Organa:** I felt kind of invincible at first, actually. People treated me with respect, or at least most of them did. Plutt obviously hated me, but it didn’t seem to matter. Everyone else accepted that I was this prophet, without much question. They did what I said, mostly. I tried not to abuse it -- I think I actually got kind of pompous with Hux about that, at one point, that I didn’t want to abuse my authority.

At the start I would meditate in Snoke’s study, like I had back at Cranbrook. There was still some of the touching and all that, but it wasn’t unbearable. I was kind of used to it by then. I’d started really feeling like the sort of sexual aspect of it was all in my head. That he wasn’t actually going to do anything. So of course then he had to up the ante.

I think it was late April, early May when he started taking me to the attic. It was painted all black. He’d nailed boards over the windows, painted them black. There was one light in the center of the room, and when he turned it off it was the darkest place you could imagine. I’d been scared of the dark as a little kid. Never really got over it. I’d learned to find little sources of light, like the crack under the door, or streetlights through my window, and it wasn’t that bad. But that attic was terrifying for me. I still have dreams about it sometimes.

I wouldn’t hear Snoke coming. He’d say something and I’d think he was across the room, and then a second later his hands would be on me. I’d jump and he’d chastise me for losing focus. I was supposed to go so deep I didn’t notice anything. That nothing could distract me. So of course he did everything he could to distract me. To make it harder. Then he’d sit behind me and put his hands on me and tell me it was to help me focus.

And it was hot up there. Even in May it was so hot up there. June was almost unbearable. I wasn’t allowed water up there, of course. Just an hour of it was bad. Towards the end it was more like two or three. And I was fasting then, too, so I wouldn’t let myself drink anything after, and…

The sparring started to change around that time, too. It started as me and Hux, and then we had our trainer. His name was Rousse, I think. Something like that. And then he and I would go one on one but it was still mostly sparring. It got to where I could halfway hold my own with him for ten or fifteen minutes, and then Snoke wanted me to fight one of the other men. Real fighting. And that wasn’t so bad -- I had a little training, and I was big for my age, and pretty strong. But if I could beat one man, then the next time it would be two. And if it took too long for two of them to take me down, then it would be three. There were a few times I had to fight basically every man there. You stay on your feet as long as you can, try to get a few hits in. There’s not really much you can do. At the time, I remember being very frustrated with myself. That I couldn’t just beat them all. I’d really started to think that I should, or that Kylo Ren would be able to. I mean, I was fifteen! I had a month’s training, at best. But I’d gotten that idea of Kylo Ren into my head so much at that point. Every time I was reminded that he wasn’t me, that he was just this character, I got furious with myself. I felt like I was letting everyone down.

 **Armitage Hux:** Oh God, I was furious with Snoke over that. He never watched himself, of course. Usually he’d be with me, we’d be in one of our study sessions, so I couldn’t try to stop things happening. Ben would come out just pummelled, all bruised and unconscious. I had to put stitches in him, once. I had some first aid training, and one of the other men was going to do it but I didn’t want any of them touching him after what they’d done. I’m still angry even now. Grown men, beating up on a child.

_[Image: J.D. Rousse, May 2019]_

**J.D. Rousse [former First Order member]:** I’d been separated from the Marines about three years, at that point. Kind of at odd ends. Doing odd jobs. Generally pretty lost. The First Order gave me a purpose. I felt calmer. Less angry.

Ben was a quick study. Very strong. Tall, long reach. Stubborn as hell. Some people, sparring, will get tapped once and just drop. He was the kind who never stopped getting back up to his feet. And he hit first. He wasn’t defensive at all. I tried to work with him on it, but I remember he really hated it, blocking. It wasn’t his style. I don’t know if I ever really knew how old he was. I think I figured he was Hux’s age. Eighteen, nineteen years old. Old enough to enlist, you know. Old enough to fight.

Snoke’s argument was that at some point we were going to send him into combat. People weren’t going to be pulling punches. They weren’t going to hang out and fight him one at a time. He needed to be prepared for anything. So that was how we had to train him.

The first time, he got his face split open pretty bad. We took him back to his room; I was going to give him a couple of quick stitches. Patch him back up. Hux was already there, waiting. The look on his face is something I can’t forget. If I’d been alone in that room, just me and Hux and Ben, I don’t know if I would’ve come out alive. Hux wasn’t as strong as Ben, but he was vicious. And I’d done something he’d never forgive. It was in his eyes; you could see it. I was thinking about it that night, and it hit me somehow that if there was going to be a war, I was on the wrong side of it. Something in how -- in what we were doing to Ben, who we were supposed to be following and serving. And how Hux had protected him, and I hadn’t. And that felt very wrong.

So I packed a duffle and I left, just like that. Walked out. Hitchhiked back to Jackson, caught a bus. By the time everything fell apart, I was in Alaska. That was a rough summer.

Looking back, honestly, I wish I’d stayed. I heard that after I left, they put Lyn [Lyndsay Child] in charge of training. I think the only thing that would’ve been worse would’ve been Plutt. Plutt would’ve killed him, on purpose. Lyn wouldn’t mean to, but he could’ve done it on accident. He was always pretty careless.

 **Thomas Child [former First Order member]:** We weren’t supposed to be there for the training, us kids, but my dad would have me watch sometimes. He said someday, maybe I’d be like Kylo Ren. That I’d be tough like him. He actually really respected him, I remember.

It’s so fucked up to say, but I wanted to be like Kylo, too. Because he really was tough. He was like the Terminator. They’d knock him down, and he’d just get up and keep swinging. You’d see a lot of people walking around with black eyes. Split lips. It wasn’t personal for most people. They still respected him. It was just what they did, out in the field. And then when it was over, it was over.

 **Armitage Hux:** I remember Lyn saying to me that it wasn’t personal. That it was training. Frankly, I didn’t give a shit. It didn’t matter what they said. You don’t beat someone like that because you care. And if Snoke had asked them to kill Ben, they would’ve. If Snoke asked them to kill me, they would’ve. It was very much on my mind. And it was very much on Ben’s, too.

 **Ben Organa:** Mostly I was worried about Hux. He was getting argumentative. Getting into fights with people. The men didn’t like him, and I wasn’t strong enough to protect him at that point. They could overpower me, as a group. I know because they did. Often. Hux and I actually started fighting over it. Because I was so worried for him, and he didn’t seem to care.

 **Armitage Hux:** The tipping point, for me, was one day about a week or so after Ben’s last training. He’d been really careful not to go too near me, but I was in the room reading, and he needed to change his shirt for some reason, and he didn’t think I’d look. He was bruised -- I mean, from hip to armpit, all the way up. You could see a footprint. It was grotesque. I was horrified. I’d sort of thought things were getting better, but they’d just stopped hitting him where it was visible.

I couldn’t say anything to Ben. I couldn’t say anything to Lyn. I wasn’t sure about Snoke. So I went to Mitaka. He was the closest thing to a rational adult we had at that point.

 **Dopheld Mitaka:** I didn’t know. That sounds terrible now, but one of us still had to go out and deal with the world, and Snoke decided that would be me. I don’t think he trusted me very much, either. There was a lot I didn’t know, towards the end. I remember seeing Ben with some bruises at the nightly services; I remember asking about that. Lyn just said, “Oh, it’s his sparring practice. Sometimes there’s a bad swing. It isn’t a big deal.” Then Hux comes to me, and I was horrified. Ben was big for his age, but he was still just a kid. I went to Lyn, which caused a huge rift between us because he didn’t like being questioned. And when he denied it all, then I went to Snoke.

I’d never seen his face get cold like that. I’d never questioned him before. For a moment, I was very, very frightened. It hit me then that he had an army. All these men who’d do what he asked. All those guns, too. It hit me, then, how much danger we were in.

And then he laughed, and he said something about how stubborn Kylo Ren is, how he always tended to push things too far, how he didn’t know his own limits. How teenagers never know their limits. And he promised me he’d talk to Kylo about it, rein him in. Keep him from hurting himself.

I wanted to believe him. At a point, you just can’t anymore.

I had a few different cars that I used. The First Order had something like five or six, and then one I’d brought with me as well, the one I’d brought Ben and Hux to the compound in. I started leaving the keys to that one in Snoke’s office. He and Hux met there often. Ben was there with him sometimes too. I’d set them on the desk while they were there, and then leave, and then come back talking about how I’d forgotten my keys. The petty cash was in that office, too. So I’d dip into it while Ben was there. Open the drawer, pull out some money, leave with it.

I knew I couldn’t talk them into leaving. I wasn’t clever like that. And I couldn’t just grab them and drag them. So I tried to give them a way out as best I could. Whenever they were ready.

 **Armitage Hux:** Of course at the time it felt like going to Mitaka was the worst thing I could’ve done. Snoke had been trying to put a wedge between myself and Ben for a long time -- I don’t know exactly what he was saying to Ben, but I remember he’d say things to me about Ben. That his background wasn’t what mine was. That he didn’t have my confidence or my intelligence or… you know, breeding, or whatever. Discipline, that was a big one. I was the disciplined one. Trying to get me to sort of put Ben down. When he realized it wasn’t working with me, he started working even harder on Ben.

It was painful. I hadn’t really expected it to be. I mean, I hadn’t really expected Ben to turn on me. It was him and I together. And then he started pulling away and being short with me, and it really did hurt. He was my best friend. I loved him like a brother.

I really started to hate Snoke at that point. For what he was doing. I really hated him then.

 **Ben Organa:** In a way, I do think some of that was me. Because I’d had a crush on Hux for a long time, and we were sharing a room, and it felt like… It wasn’t even so much a temptation but more a fear that I would start to feel tempted again. I was trying so hard to tell myself I was straight that any kind of moment of interest that fluttered up caused a panic in me. Hux standing up for me and trying to protect me was obviously really hard to deal with, in that light. That kind of attention from a boy I really liked. Snoke would talk about how Hux didn’t really like me, and was using me, and was jealous of me, and I almost wanted to believe it. Because then he wasn’t being kind to me, and I didn’t need to feel attracted. I didn’t want to be. I started to resent him because of that, I think. And then it was easier for Snoke to twist that feeling further. I was very unkind to Hux after a certain point. I started being very unkind to a lot of people. And people were treating me differently too. I think they had to. I mean, they were beating me up. Or watching me be beaten up. It was only a few times, but it changed things. There was sort of this feeling that I needed to be toughened up. And I felt I needed to be tougher. Rey was the only person I could still be soft around. I could still be kind.

 **Marnie Plutt:** He was always very good to her. I remember Supreme Leader telling me once that they had a special bond. I think he was hinting around, but I didn’t get it. We didn’t know anything about who he’d been, of course. Maybe some other people did, but I didn’t watch the news or anything, so I didn’t know. He was just the Prophet. He seemed young, but then he seemed old, too. Very quiet. But he was so kind to Rey. I was glad she had a protector. That’s awful to say; I should’ve been that person for her, but I never knew how. I felt like I just had to wait for someone to step in, and then he did. It was kind of an answer to a prayer, for me.

 **Ben Organa:** And then Snoke, of course, started to tell me that Rey was a distraction. That I shouldn’t worry about her, that she would be fine. That he would take care of things with her and Plutt, because Plutt was pretty abusive to her. He took her books away from her; he’d have her, like, shunned -- all kinds of things. She was such a good kid and her life had been so miserable thanks to him. And Snoke would say he’d take care of it and then he wouldn’t, really. So that I think might have been the start of thinking that things were wrong. That Snoke wasn’t being truthful. I feel like that’s one of those things -- I mean he wanted me to think I was a prophet and he could read minds and we were going to bring about the end times. Obviously he wasn’t telling the truth about anything at all. But those big lies I feel are the ones that people kind of prepare for. They ease their way into it. It’s the lies they tell without planning that get them into trouble, maybe. But even then, it wasn’t a big revelation. Just another note of uneasiness.

 **Rey Organa:** I had a few books. I didn’t have many, but I had a few, that I’d brought with me or that people had given me while I was at the Compound. One day, Plutt took them all from me. I could put up with a lot, but not that. I went and I found Ben, and I told him what had happened. He said he’d go to Snoke about, make Plutt leave me alone.

A little after that, Mitaka came and got me and took me to see Snoke. I’d never been alone with him before. He touched my hair a lot. I remember that. I had to wear a headscarf, and he straightened it. He straightened my clothes. A lot of touching. I was very afraid of him. I remember thinking he would pull me to pieces and no one would say anything to stop him.

He took me out of Plutt’s house and had me move into the children’s house. He said I could take classes with Miss Mary if I wanted. That she’d give me books to read. And that sometime, later, when he and Kylo Ren weren’t so busy, then he and I would read together, and we could talk about books. I remember thinking that I should probably feel honored, but I was just scared of him. I didn’t want to be near him. I didn’t want him to touch me anymore.

 

**VIII. The End of the World**

 

_[Image: Snoke’s house in the First Order compound, July 2013 (image courtesy Outside Magazine)]_

**Ben Organa:** My visions were getting really really violent at that point. I think all the beating people up and getting beaten up and shooting things probably had something to do with that. And then again, too, wanting to sort of give Snoke what he wanted. And I started with seeing this dead world. I guess it made sense that I’d build up what had gotten me there. Looking back, it’s almost kind of comical in a way. Very teenage. I remember I’d have this flaming sword, stuff like that. People all in black with capes. But it was very serious then. It was all real, by that point. I’d lost the absurdity of it. It just felt real.

There wasn’t really a dramatic final vision or anything like that. They were escalating, I think, but it wasn’t like this new thing suddenly happened. I would go up and we’d meditate in the dark and it was awful and then we’d come down and sometimes Snoke would want to talk to me about what I’d seen and then sometimes he wouldn’t. And this time he sat me down, in his study, and we talked about how I was trying to become Kylo Ren, but something was holding me back, which he said was my innocence. Which obviously made me a little nervous. Then he said that the world needed to become something else, too. That I was going to change the world, and the world would change me. Which to do that, we both had to burn our old selves away. Like a phoenix. And that the spark to that, or the match I think he called it, was that I was going to kill someone.

I was going to kill a police officer.

I threw up, actually, when he said that. Not in front of him, not right away. But after, I found some bushes, and I threw up.

I already knew I couldn’t do it.

 **Dopheld Mitaka:** I knew something strange was happening with Ben and Snoke. It was obvious. But he never told me what he was doing or what the plan was. “Things were changing,” that was what he’d say.

But you could tell it was all falling apart very quickly. He talked a lot about the end of the world, obviously. The year 2000 and the millenium and the end of the world. And then, too, he’d talk about Ruby Ridge. About Waco. About defending ourselves. About going to war, if war was what it took. Being under siege. Being willing to die. Being willing to kill. And Ben sitting up there behind him, white as a ghost. Staring at his feet. He’d stopped eating at that point, I think. He was definitely getting skinny. I remember that.

People started leaving. People started sending their children away. The funny thing is Snoke barely seemed to notice. You think about Jim Jones, who went more and more berserk the more people tried to leave him, and Snoke just didn’t care. Whatever he was doing with Ben, or to Ben, that was his sole focus.

He didn’t need to manipulate all of us. Just one person. That was it.

He did have me make Ben a fake I.D. I remember that. It was bad; it was someone else’s old driver’s license and a color copier. A laminator. I had Desiree help me, actually. Then I told her to tell someone else -- Thomas [Child], I think. His mom and the younger children were gone by then, but he’d stayed with his father, Lyndsay. I wanted the word to get around somehow, and I knew Ben liked to be around the younger kids. So I hoped he would find out. And he did, I think. He didn’t use it himself, but he made a fake I.D. for Hux before he left. I remember someone said that.

 **Armitage Hux:** It was pretty immediately obvious that Ben and Snoke had had a bad conversation. Ben stopped eating. Got very withdrawn, quiet. Meditating all the time. Snappish, although part of that was being hungry, I’m sure. It was terrifying, actually. I remember one moment thinking very clearly that Ben was going to die. Either he was going to just starve himself completely, or Snoke would finally win and the Ben I knew would be gone and it would just be Kylo Ren. Either way, Ben would be gone. My friend would be gone. I couldn’t let that happen.

About three days into that last fast, maybe four, I woke up and Ben was over in his bed, just shivering. It was really hard to see. He’d lost quite a bit of weight -- he was fasting the whole time we were there, at least one day a week, maybe two; and then he was growing, too, so it just made it all worse. I had to do something, but I couldn’t think of what. Finally I just got out of my bed and went over to his and sort of lay down next to him and wrapped him up. He was sweaty and sticky and -- I mean it was hot. But he sort of calmed down a bit, it felt like. Stopped shaking so much.

He woke up a little and asked what I was doing. I told him he was cold and I was warming him up. Sort of expected him to argue, but he didn’t. Just went “Oh. Okay,” and then back to sleep again. But he reached up -- I had my hand over his chest, the one hand sort of [pats his chest] -- and he grabbed my hand and he held on to it.

It’s emotional now, of course. At the time it was more just this tidal wave of thought. Because Snoke had been working so hard to drive a wedge between us but obviously he hadn’t gotten all the way there. Ben still cared about me. He still wanted me with him. I mean he was holding my fucking hand. It was very very clear to me in that moment that I could get Ben out of there, if I had a good plan and worked quickly. But I had to work so quickly. There wasn’t time to feel anything; I just had to move.

 **Ben Organa:** I don’t remember the first night at all. The next day, Snoke had me break my fast, which I was pretty upset about at the time. I also had to take my meals with him, which I wasn’t very happy about either. He didn’t eat in front of me, of course. He never did.

I vaguely remember the second night, though, possibly just because I was thinking better. Not really details, but I remember Hux being with me, and feeling very safe. In the morning I was pretty upset about it, actually. Snoke was supposed to be fixing this thing in me, making me not be attracted to Hux, and now I was having these dreams about him. It was really awful.

 **Armitage Hux:** Obviously I couldn’t just walk up and hug him in the middle of broad day. That wouldn’t work. But at night it was a lot easier, and his guard wasn’t up the same way.

In the day I worked on Snoke. I’d go to him and just be really awful about Ben. Saying he was talking in his sleep, that he was coming unhinged. Starving himself to death, all that. Because obviously whatever was going on with Ben was something to do with Snoke, that Snoke wanted him to do something really dreadful or dangerous. I needed to know what it was, and I needed Snoke to change his mind about having Ben do it, and I needed Snoke to ask me to do it instead. That was what I needed from him, so that was what I worked at. And I was relentless at it.

And then at night, with Ben, it was just getting him to trust me again. He didn’t even have to trust me much. Just enough.

 **Ben Organa:** I remember going out to the firing range. Snoke had given me the gun I was supposed to use already. So I’d take out and load it and look at the target and try to imagine the police officer. Like the hat and the uniform, and everything. And then I’d raise the gun and go to fire and it would always be someone else. One of my parents or Hux or Poe or my grandfather [Bail Organa], even. I couldn’t pull the trigger. I felt like crying just constantly. All the time.

The third night I think is the one I remember most clearly. I remember telling Hux that it should’ve been him. That I couldn’t do what Snoke had asked of me. I never said what it was, I know that. I couldn’t. I wasn’t supposed to, obviously, and then I don’t think I thought he’d believe me back then. But I remember telling him that I wished it had been him. Which, in retrospect, was a terrible thing to say. And I don’t think he could’ve done it either. But I’d always admired Hux. He seemed so tough. I guess I felt if anyone I knew could do it, it would be him.

 **Armitage Hux:** So that was the third night, and then the day after that I went to Snoke and said that Ben had told me flat-out he couldn’t do it. That it ought to have been me. And I told Snoke that was probably the first sensible thing Ben had said in months. And he sort of hemmed and hawed and then he did finally tell me what he’d asked Ben to do. What I would be asked to do, if Ben failed.

It was… It was a hell of a thing. For me, more picturing Ben trying to do it. How that would be for him. And I’m not terribly burdened by a lot of empathy but I just really felt that would break him. Like utterly, there’d be no way out for him. One way or another he’d be gone.

But I did think I could do it, if I had to. For Ben, I thought I could do it. Still do, honestly.

But obviously the plan was to get him out without anyone murdering anyone. That was the primary goal. But you do wonder.

 **Ben Organa:** The fourth night, I just remember Hux being very upset. And trying to make him feel better. It really was very strange, very dreamlike. Not just that night but all of it. So trying to piece together what I remember, what I’ve been told, what I deliberately might’ve tried to erase -- It’s hard to go through it all and find what’s a memory and what isn’t.

But I remember how upset he was, and how hard that was for me. Because I did love him, in a lot of ways. Not just a crush, but he was my friend and we’d been going through this strange thing together and I just really loved him. I didn’t like him being upset like that. I think I might have tried to hug him back, or something.

There was this sense of -- It’s hard to explain, but something like I wasn’t supposed to be awake for any of it, because then we could both sort of pretend it wasn’t happening. I don’t know why we would’ve needed that, maybe to get around Snoke or maybe just for me, because I had to come to terms with not losing my feelings for Hux like I thought I would. Or not losing my feelings at all, the way I thought I would. So I had to keep telling myself I was asleep, but I remember that night letting myself be awake a little. Sort of. I don’t know. Like I said, it’s very hard to explain. And I think at that point I didn’t have a really clear line between real and not real. Even when I was awake.

But I do remember the next day, Hux telling me that he’d talked to Snoke. That stands out very, very clearly.

 **Armitage Hux:** When I was with Ben at night, he was sort of drifting in and out. Not really awake, not really asleep. I needed him to be awake for this part, so I waited. That day he meditated with Snoke in the morning. He didn’t always, but that was when Snoke called him, so that was what he did. They had lunch together, and then Ben was free for a while -- relatively speaking, anyway -- so I could talk to him then, and so I did.

 **Ben Organa:** He told me -- I don’t know if I can do it exactly anymore. But it was something like Leader Snoke was too wise to put all his eggs in one basket, so he’d organized for Hux to serve as my backup. I would go out and make the first attempt at killing the police officer -- and he was very careful to say exactly what I was meant to be doing. That I was going to go out and kill a police officer. So I knew that he wasn’t just guessing, that he had to have talked to Snoke about it. I mean, no one else knew. Literally no one, not even Mitaka. And Snoke had told me that no one else _could_ know. This was my task. God had chosen me for this. Not Hux, me. And no one could do it but me.

And now Hux is telling me that if I can’t, he will. And he _knew_. He hadn’t just guessed, he knew.

I don’t even think I said anything to him, after. I think I just walked out. Kept walking.

It was absolutely everything in the world falling down around my ears. I’d run away from home; I’d given up almost everything to come here because I thought God wanted me here. Because God was telling me things, giving me visions. This whole thing and suddenly none of it was true. It couldn’t be true. Because Snoke had told me that no one could start the war but me. No one at all. And suddenly he’d brought in backup. And I wanted so badly to believe that Hux was lying, but he knew. He couldn’t have known unless Snoke had told him. Or unless Snoke had told _someone_ , but he wasn’t supposed to tell anyone at all, so.

So I went around and around in my head like that, trying to make it not true, absolutely failing. And then I stopped, suddenly, and there was Rey, and it was like the clouds just opened and everything made sense again.

And I knew what I had to do.

 **Rey Organa:** I’d gone to see my mom -- I wasn’t living with them anymore; they had a house on the Compound and then there was another, separate place for children and I was there. It was just me and Desiree [Mitaka] and Thomas [Child] at that point. But I wanted to see my mom and she didn’t want to talk to me, or Plutt said she couldn’t, or something. So I left, and just sort of wandered, and after a while I was too tired to keep going, or too sad, so I sat down where I was. It was the armory, where they kept all the guns and things.

And then Ben came. He didn’t even see me at first. He looked sad. So I called out to him, and he looked up, and his face lit up. He went from being that sad to suddenly being very happy. I was actually pretty confused. I think I thought he might have a fever, or something. It was hard for me to understand how anyone could be happy that day.

 **Ben Organa:** I’ve always said that if God ever did speak to me, that was the moment it happened. I didn’t have a vision; I didn’t see anything. But I knew. I knew what I was going to do, and I knew it was going to work, and I knew that in the end Rey and I would be happy. It was very very certain. Not clear, exactly. Just certain.

 **Rey Organa:** He told me it would make sense soon. I didn’t know what he meant, but I believed him. It helped a lot, actually. I felt better.

 

**IX: Flight**

 

 **Ben Organa:** I knew Mitaka left his keys in Snoke’s office a lot, so I took those. I knew where the money was. And I knew a little how they made fake I.D.s there, so I made one for Hux. I had his school picture to use for it. It was Mitaka’s car, so I put his name on it, so it would match the registration and insurance and everything. I didn’t need one for myself; they’d give me one when I was sent out. And I took some money, but not much. A little for Hux, and a little for me. Because I’d thought about it, and I didn’t think Hux could come with me and Rey, but I wanted him to be able to leave. So I made plans for that. For him.

After that, it was just waiting. It wasn’t very long. Two or three days. I was calmer by then. Snoke said it seemed my mind had finally cleared, and I told him that it had. It wasn’t a lie, exactly, so it felt safe. Sometimes I wondered if he knew; sometimes I was sure he did. But I couldn’t turn back. In my heart I was already gone. It was just waiting.

Snoke pulled me aside one night after meeting, and I knew. I had my gun. He gave me my car keys and told me my papers would be in the glove box. He told me to leave after dark. It was July, so that was pretty late. The wait was hard. Fast and slow at the same time. I walked, mostly. Just walking around in circles, waiting. Once it got dark, I went back up to our room for the last time. Hux was in bed. He looked like he was trying to pretend to be asleep, but not doing a good job. I didn’t shake him or anything. His hand was sort of out [he extends his hand], so I put Mitaka’s keys in it. I’d already put the money and his fake I.D. in the glovebox, so that was ready. I told him which car, and I told him to wait until he heard me drive away, but then to start moving at once and not stop for anything. I told him that he didn’t need to worry about me coming back. That I’d made it so I couldn’t. I didn’t tell him about Rey. I don’t know why; I just couldn’t. It didn’t seem like the kind of idea he’d like.

Then I kissed him goodbye and I walked away. And that was really hard to do. But I knew that was how it had to be, so that was how I did it.

 **Rey Organa:** I hadn’t really been asleep. I don’t know why; I couldn’t sleep. It felt like something was coming. Then Ben walked in, and everything made sense. I sat up, and he came and picked me up. I had a blanket with me, and a bear. He carried me out to the car, and put me down in the back seat. I asked him where we going, and he said, “Home.” And that absolutely shouldn’t have made any sense, but that night it did. And that was that. He started driving, and I finally fell asleep, in the backseat of the car.

 **Armitage Hux:** It seemed like it took forever for that car to start. So, so long. I remember thinking it had gone, and I’d missed it, and I’d missed my shot. Then I heard the engine turning over. They’d given him a really bad car, probably deliberately so. The exhaust was loud. When I heard that, it was like “Oh, shit. This is really happening.” So I got up and got my shoes on and got moving.

He had money for me, in the glovebox. And a fake ID. Mitaka’s name on it. I never knew his first name; I thought it was fake, at first. _Dopheld._ I actually laughed, looking at it. Then I think I cried a little. Then I started driving.

It was all very fast, when it started. And then the next thing you’re in the car and the radio’s on and you’re driving and it’s like, that was it. All of that running, and now Tom Petty’s playing and I’m trying to remember how to get back to Detroit, looking for street signs. Terribly surreal experience.

 **Ben Organa:** Somehow I got to US-127 pretty easily, and then I just went north from there. My dad grew up in Northern Michigan, and we’d gone up there pretty frequently when I was a kid, so I felt like I could find my way around. It seemed like a good place to disappear. Which, obviously, seemed safest for a lot of reasons. I was scared of Snoke, scared of a lot of things. It felt like the whole First Order was just coming after me, at any second. So I thought, you know. I’d go to the middle of nowhere and build a cabin or something and be safe. To the extent I was thinking at that point, which kind of wasn’t much. Mostly it just felt like I was putting myself in God’s hands.

 **Armitage Hux:** I did go home, actually. I think I was there by about one in the morning, maybe one-thirty. Drove around the neighborhood a while.

The thing was, Snoke had always sort of implied my dad knew what was happening. That he wanted me there. For me to leave like that… I didn’t know what would happen, if I went in that house. I didn’t know if I could. And then, on the other hand, I was very aware of everyone I’d left behind, and they were armed and angry and very dangerous. I didn’t want them coming after my family to get to me.

So I left. Drove into Ohio for a little bit. Indiana too, I think. At one point I remember sort of finding myself driving past this toll road. That was morning. Indiana. There were Amish people in a horse and buggy going past. It was very, very clear that I had no idea what the hell I was doing anymore. I honestly did just pull over and cry for a little bit. I felt so helpless.

 **Ben Organa:** I finally pulled over outside Houghton Lake. I still remember that rest stop. They had a coffee machine there, which I thought was weird. There was a pay phone. I didn’t know who to call, and then I thought of my dad. It wasn’t exactly what I wanted to do, but I couldn’t think of anything better. So I called him.

 **Han Solo:** The phone rings at that time of day, you always answer. I figured it had to be Leia. But then there was this quiet on the other end, and I knew.

I genuinely hadn’t realized how much I’d prepared for the worst until it didn’t happen. The relief was just overpowering. He was scared, he was obviously in a lot of trouble, he’d apparently kidnapped a five year-old, but okay, he was alive. We could work with the rest. I wasn’t that worried about it, now that I knew he was alive.

 **Ben Organa:** I wasn’t even sure he’d talk to me. That he was so relieved to hear my voice was overwhelming. I told myself so many times they [his parents] wouldn’t love me anymore. It was the only way to get through. But he did. He absolutely did, and he answered the phone, and I never forgot that.

 **Han Solo:** I gave him directions to Maz, who’d gotten my ass out of a lot of scrapes too, although nothing this bad. Then I started making calls of my own. Maz first, obviously, and then Leia, and then just a lot of people in general.

 **Maz Kanata:** I was up already. Well I don’t sleep late in the summer. Sun’s up, you might as well be up with it. But there was money to get together. Papers for Ben and the friend he had with him. New car, obviously. No one was sure how far the First Order would go looking for them, you see, and I didn’t want him in anything they’d know. Han told me he’d given me until noon, which was expecting a lot of miracle from an old woman. But I did it. I’ve always been decent at miracles.

One thing I wanted to make sure to do was feed him up. Especially once I saw him -- he was scrawny, and she wasn’t much better. But also I didn’t want him going too much farther. Wanted him where I could keep an eye on him. He was already tired enough. A good meal, and he’d be lucky to make it another hour before he needed a lay-down. Turned out he didn’t even make it that far. I think otherwise he’d have crossed the Bridge. Would’ve been gone. But once he stayed a night I figured he’d stay longer. And it’s what he did, too.

Sad seeing him like that, though. Terribly sad. There was such a weight on him. So much fear. You know, and he was a kid. He really was. It was too much for a boy that age to be put through. It shouldn’t have ever happened.

 **Ben Organa:** We went up to see Maz, and she took care of us. Got us new clothes, food, money, just everything. Drove a little further, and pulled in at the first hotel we saw. I just couldn’t go any further. I was too tired.

 **Armitage Hux:** I wound up back in Michigan sometime in the afternoon. Found my way to Adrian -- the Wesco there, by the college. There was someone at the pay phone when I pulled up, and I remembered feeling so frustrated. I didn’t want to keep driving anymore. I just needed to quit. So I filled up the tank and then went inside -- they have those enormous travel mugs, and I got one of those, filled it up with pop. Went back outside and the pay phone was empty. I thought, “Well, if Ben was here, he’d call it a sign.” So I called 911. Told them where I was, that I’d been abducted, which felt a little strong, but I guess it was accurate enough. That I was free now but didn’t know what to do. They said they’d send someone to get me but I told them I had a car and to just give me directions. We sort of compromised in the end. A police cruiser came and led me to the county sheriff’s building, which was just downtown. Sheriff Statura was waiting for me there. I knew him a little, from when my dad was county prosecutor, before we moved. I remember he told me my dad was looking for me, and I sort of scoffed. Said I was pretty sure he already knew. And he said, “No, trust me. He didn’t know.”

_[Image: Miles Statura gives a press briefing, July 1999]_

**Miles Statura [Lenawee County Sheriff 1992-2016]:** I’d known Brendol since he was county prosecutor. I’d see Armitage sometimes. Little kid, quiet. Polite. Very formal, how some kids are. Kind of stiff. Say “Mother” and “Father.” He was still like that, only he looked basically like he’d gone through hell. Skinny, tired. Little dirty, which didn’t seem like him. Big dark circles under the eyes. He had this giant Wesco cup in his hands and he asked if he could use the restroom before I interviewed him. Very polite about it.

We got him settled in a back room, got him some lunch -- he ate like he hadn’t eaten for a while, which I guess he hadn’t. From the sounds of it he’d been mostly just driving around all day, trying to figure out what to do. I’d gotten word that Ben was out, so I told him that. That we’d heard from him. He perked up, but he was still pretty suspicious. Said he wanted to talk to Leia. Didn’t want to hear it from anyone else.

So I called her. That was actually the first person he really talked to. Not me, not his parents. Leia. I never knew how she felt about it.

 **Armitage Hux:** It wasn’t at all as I expected. We basically chit-chatted for an hour or so. My parents came. That was awkward. Then Leia was there and we were left alone. She told me about Ben, that he’d left with Rey. That was… he’d said, before he left the last time, that he’d made it so he couldn’t go back. I wasn’t sure I believed him. But if he was with Rey, I figured he was safe enough. He wouldn’t take Rey back. Not with what Plutt would do to her if he did. So that was good.

Leia kissed me on the way out. Touched my hair. It’s funny the things you remember. She seemed so trustworthy. Kind, mostly, but also I felt she wouldn’t bullshit me, and that mattered more at the time. I needed someone to be straightforward with me, and I knew she would do it.

Then I told Sheriff Statura what I could. It wasn’t much. I’d driven around a lot and I was pretty lost most of the time. But I gave him names, things like that. Told them what I felt I could. I did -- It’s awful, now, and I regret it so much. I did leave things out. Some of the apocalypse talk, the Snoke being a mind-reader thing, the prophecy stuff. And I didn’t tell them Snoke was planning on killing a cop. I regret that so much.

At the time, I just felt no one would believe me. I felt like they’d drive up and Snoke would say we were lying and it was all just teenage foolishness and we’d run off to be with him of our own free will, which I suppose in a way we had, and -- But I mean, we’d been gone for months. There’d been this manhunt all over the state for us. It was serious and it was being taken seriously; I just… I didn’t trust anyone. At least not adults. Leia, I guess, but that was it.

I mean. Snoke shouldn’t have ever been a teacher, but he was. We shouldn’t have been left alone with him, but we were. He takes us to this place -- I mean, they were beating Ben up, the men there! They fucking took it in turns! And Mitaka, who I am less angry about, but still. He saw everything. He saw everything. So he left his keys laying on a desk. And that was it. That was all. The rest was up to us.

My point is at some point you stop trusting. I wish I hadn’t. But I can’t be too angry at myself for that. I did have my reasons.

 **Miles Statura:** We didn’t have a psychiatrist or psychologist on hand to help Armitage. I wish we had. I did call MSP [Michigan State Police] to try to get someone, but the process took longer than it should have, and we didn’t have that kind of time.

It’s easy for people who weren’t in his shoes to say he should’ve told the truth from the start. But looking at him, it was clear he’d been messed up pretty thoroughly. It was our fault for not expecting it. We should’ve had a plan. We didn’t.

 **Brendol Hux:** You expect it to be this sort of joyous reunion, and it just wasn’t. Hux was so distant. From myself and from Lucy. It’s a hard thing to go through. But also, very obviously, hard for him, to be going home with these people he no longer felt he could trust, and that was our fault. It put him in a terrible situation.

 **Dopheld Mitaka:** I actually heard both cars leave that night, so I knew. Not about Rey; I didn’t find that out until the next morning, but I knew the boys were gone.

Snoke was unnerved. He tried to hide it, but you could see. He had some kind of story prepared, something about how they’d gone to enact one of his plans, but it was dicey. And he couldn’t explain Rey’s disappearance. Desiree was pretty upset by it. She liked Rey quite a bit, so that was hard.

I talked with Snoke that night, after meeting. He asked me if I thought I could track the boys down. If I could find them before they reached anyone else. I figured it was already too late for that, but I told him I’d try. I took a gun -- I think it was the first time I’d ever actually had one in my hands, and I went to the Children’s House.

 **Thomas Child:** Mr. Mitaka came in -- I think he thought we’d have someone watching us, by that point. He had a gun, just in case. But Mom left with the younger children already; she was scared by how the men were talking. I’d been watching Rey and Des, but Rey was gone and it was just us. And then Mr. Mitaka came in with that gun, and he looked at us, and he looked at me specifically and he asked where the adults were. I told him it was just me, and he asked me if I wanted him to drop me off with my mom. And I told him yes. I did. I didn’t want to be there anymore. I wanted to be home. It felt awful, leaving my dad like that. But I just didn’t want to be there anymore. I was too scared.

 **Dopheld Mitaka:** I took the kids and I left. No one tried to stop me. There weren’t really many people left to see. I took Thomas to his mother’s house and then Des and I went to Ohio. We actually went to Sandusky, Ohio, and found a cheap motel. I took her to Cedar Point the next day. In retrospect, I guess that was pretty strange. But I wanted her to have a nice day. I felt like I was probably going to jail in the next few weeks and I didn’t know what would happen, so we rode rollercoasters. I don’t know if it helped, but I wanted to try.

 **Desiree Mitaka [former First Order member]:** There were a million things I wanted to ask my dad, but I didn’t know where to start. I remember just really hoping that Rey was okay. That was the only thing I could think of. I wanted Rey to be all right.

 

**X. Terry**

 

_[Image: Terry, Lorraine, and Finn Banneret, Christmas 1998]_

**Ben Organa:** One of my hopes was that, with me and Hux gone, Snoke would give up on his whole plan of killing the police officer. I figured that he’d have to. In the first place, he said he needed me to do it. In the second, he needed an army to fight a war with, and there wasn’t anyone left. I figured he’d have to let it go. At the same time, I was terrified he wouldn’t.

 **Armitage Hux:** I thought about it a lot. You’d read the paper, searching. But there wasn’t anything there. I figured he’d given it up. That he knew he couldn’t, so he wasn’t going to try.

_Even with Ben, Hux, and Mitaka all gone, Snoke wasn’t quite alone in the world. Roger Plutt had been looking for a chance to prove himself to the Supreme Leader, to become his right hand. Now he had his shot._

**Marnie Plutt:** Plutt was the only one happy about it all, I thought. He’d be up with Supreme Leader all hours of the day. Supreme Leader would talk to me too sometimes, although not much. He did try to reassure me about Rey. Said that Rey was with Ben. That there was a plan for them. That they were both very special, unique individuals. That it was in their blood. Hinting around about my father again, I guess.

But I hoped he was right. Ben was kind to Rey. I figured it’d be good for her to be around someone that kind. I wanted that for her. To have someone kind taking care of her.

But mostly it was Plutt and Supreme Leader. They were working on something. Plutt was happy about it. Very excited. He thought it would be a good thing for the First Order. A really good thing. I was afraid, a little, but I kept it to myself. That seemed the safest thing, with how they were in those days. And I wanted to be happy. That was important to me, then. That Plutt have a happy wife. It seemed like that was my job at that point. So I kept my worry to myself and put a good face on it.

_In 1999, Terrence “Terry” Banneret was a ten-year veteran of the Lenawee County Sheriff’s department. He lived in Hudson Township with his wife Lorraine and son Finn, then seven years old._

**Finn Banneret:** I remember my dad was actually kind of interested in the missing boys [Armitage Hux and Ben Organa]. He used to say they were close to where we were. He couldn’t say why, he just said he felt they were close.

I think he knew Hux was safe, at least. I think he heard about it, when it happened.  He didn’t say anything to us, but something seemed different those last few days. Like a weight off. He’d been worried, and then he was cheerful again. Talked more. Played with me more, too.

He worked nights a lot. Mostly just highway patrolling, looking for drunk drivers, people speeding, running stop signs. It wasn’t dangerous but he seemed like he was all right with that. He had all kinds of statistics about how careless driving killed people. Drunks, especially. He said too many people died of selfishness. I still think about that sometimes.

I’d go to bed and I’d wake up and he’d be there in the kitchen drinking coffee. He’d drink two cups of coffee and go to bed and sleep like a log until afternoon.

I woke up and he wasn’t there. That’s the whole story, isn’t it? One morning I woke up and my father just wasn’t there anymore. There’s more to it, of course, but not for me. Not really.

 **Marnie Plutt:** Plutt was gone all night. He came back excited. “God is good,” he said. “God is good.” Later he’d say it was because he’d killed a black man -- that’s not the word he used, but I don’t talk that way anymore -- but he didn’t tell any of the rest of us that day what he'd done. He and Supreme Leader got together, and were together a long while. At meeting, Supreme Leader told us the next week would test our mettle. What we were really going to be, and if we deserved Heaven or if the whole world would be blown to Hell. I was frightened, but I was excited, too. It felt like we were really doing something. We’d gotten rid of all the nonbelievers, and it was just us, and we’d do something amazing.

 **Miles Statura:** He [Terry] was out by Devil’s Lake when it happened; a local spotted his cruiser there at around seven in the morning, lights still flashing. Terry was about fifteen, maybe twenty feet away, on the shoulder. He’d been shot twice in the head. Then they ran him over on their way out. Just to humiliate him. Just to be cruel.

He hadn’t called anything in; I don’t think he saw it coming. Just a routine stop -- someone speeding, or weaving between lanes. Loud muffler, taillights out. All of the above, maybe. He put the lights on, walked over, asked for license and registration -- that was it. A good man, a good dad, a good person. Just gone.

The grief is hard to describe. And his family… Lorraine never recovered. She leaned on him so much for everything. Finn tried, but he was so young. He couldn’t take care of her. He shouldn’t’ve even had to try.

Anyway all that gets in the morning papers, and then the phone starts ringing. Jackson County first, saying they thought they’d found the First Order compound. That was hard, after. One day sooner was all we needed. We didn’t get it.

And then Leia, and Brendol. One right after the other.

_[Image: Detroit Free Press article. Headline reads “Answers Sought in Shooting of Lenawee County Sheriff’s Deputy"]_

**Ben Organa:** I’d been checking the newspapers. I wanted to know what was going on. When I saw the article [about Terry Banneret] -- I knew at once. It was the worst feeling. I could’ve saved him if I said something sooner. I didn’t. It was really hard.

Maz had given me a cell phone, so I called my dad’s house. Mom answered. I almost hung up, which is awful, but. I just felt like I’d be in so much trouble if I told her. I got her to give the phone to Dad. Then I still couldn’t talk. It was… I still wasn’t sure what the right thing was. If I was right, then Snoke had committed a crime and needed to go to jail. If Snoke was right, I was damning myself and everyone around me to Hell. I had to choose and I didn’t know how. It was… It was just really hard.

 **Han Solo:** He was hysterical, pretty much. Panicking, guilty, just really worked up. He started asking me if Snoke had lied to him. If anything Snoke said was true. If he was doing the right thing. All I could do was keep repeating. Yes, Snoke lied. No, he wasn’t telling the truth. Yes, you’re doing the right thing. Once we got him talked down, then he could open up. It was hard to hear. Imagine those two kids trying to kill someone, you know? It was sick. Just sick. But that was Snoke. Sick fuck.

 **Armitage Hux:** My first thought was to tell my dad, but the distrust was still so strong. I didn’t really have anyone I trusted but Leia, so I called her. I didn’t mean to tell her; I just wanted her to say that I could talk to my dad. It was her idea that I just tell her, like she was the only one there. And that worked.

We were talking about it and it sort of hit me. Because killing the police officer was the first part of Snoke’s plan, but it wasn’t the last. After we did that, we were going to go to his funeral and kill everyone there. Other cops, lawyers, politicians, whoever. My dad didn’t live in Lenawee County anymore, and he didn’t work there, and he wasn’t their Rep, but he still knew everyone. He would’ve been there. I think… I know. That was part of the point. He wanted me to see my dad die. Maybe kill him myself if he could make that happen.

I didn’t trust my dad. I was so angry with him most of the time. That didn’t mean I could kill him. That didn’t mean --

I broke down. I just broke down.

 **Brendol Hux:** He dropped the phone. Just collapsed, right there in the living room. It was the most heartbreaking thing I’d ever seen. I knew I had to pass the story on to Miles, but it was difficult to do. God bless Leia for getting there first. She was so tough.

 **Miles Statura:** Obviously we wanted to take action at once, but at the same time, we had to be careful. Waco was definitely on our minds at that point. No one wants to make that mistake twice. Again, though, we had an officer dead already. If there were going to be more deaths, we had to prevent them. It was a delicate situation. Thankfully Dopheld Mitaka decided to step forward. He had good timing.

 **Dopheld Mitaka:** I hadn’t heard about the shooting, no. Well, and I didn’t know that was the plan. It just seemed like the time to step forward. I left Desiree with the Child family -- I wasn’t very happy about that, but Lyndsay was still at the Compound, so I thought it was safe enough. And I turned myself in. This was in Jackson. They called Lenawee County and sent someone to talk to me; that’s when I heard about everything going on. My heart sank. I didn’t know they were planning on killing anyone. Let alone that many people.

I gave them everything I had. They were mostly concerned with the children, with not killing any kids if things went wrong. But there weren’t any left, so I told them that. They had the location of the Compound, but not where buildings were on the Compound; I drew them a map. I gave them a rough idea of what weapons they had, which was pretty worrying to them I’m sure. I think in the end, though, most of them were in the armory still. They didn’t have many weapons on them when they were captured.

I offered to go in with the negotiators and try to talk to them. They weren’t really interested in that at first, but I did go in a couple of times. There was a phone in Snoke’s house that worked; that was where everyone was holed up. I would call them, and Snoke and I talked. He told me I was going to Hell. I told him I figured he was, too. He got a good laugh out of that. Said we’d have to see which of us got there first. It was probably some kind of threat, but I was too mad at him to care anymore.

 **Miles Statura:** Compound was pretty big, a good couple of acres. Lots of buildings. But it was a ghost town by then. We closed it down one building at a time. Wound up around the last house, waiting.

 **Marnie Plutt:** Lyn was waiting at the roadside, watching. Saw them coming. Cop cars. Some trucks. He said he saw big black tanks, too, but I don’t remember seeing those when we left. We’d moved everything to Supreme Leader’s house. Stuck together. We couldn’t cook much; I’d make sandwiches. It was me, Plutt, Supreme Leader of course. Lyn. Dan and Sheila. I don’t remember everyone else. It was crowded. We all slept on the floor. The men had guns, except for Supreme Leader. The women weren’t allowed. The women that had been able to shoot had left by then. The ones who stayed were more like Plutt. Thought like him. Or like me, I guess.

It took a long time. Four or five days, I think. They’d creep up and creep up and creep up. Call on the phone. Mitaka called a few times. Supreme Leader thought that was funny but I never saw the joke in it.

The men wanted to set up a sniper post in the attic but Supreme Leader said they couldn’t. Said that was Kylo Ren’s space, and he’d want it back. Plutt got angry with him, but there wasn’t going against Supreme Leader. Lyn and the other men wouldn’t allow it. So they set up on the second floor. After that, it was over quick. We shot, they shot. Plutt got hit, up in the shoulder. A little more over and he wouldn’t have made it. It went on for a time, and then there weren’t bullets left; they hadn’t brought enough. Supreme Leader called someone on the phone. Then he went out to surrender, and the rest of us followed. Only Plutt stayed behind. Police came and got him anyway. And then we were in cop cars and that was it. It was over.

_[Image: Marnie Plutt in court, July 1999.]_

**Rey Organa:** We were staying in hotels then, driving around, always moving. We didn’t turn the tv on -- I think Ben’s dad wanted him to stay away from the news, and honestly we both kind of wanted to anyway, at that point. But the people in the next room had theirs on, and we heard it through the wall, what was happening. That they’d surrendered. So I turned the tv on and messed with the remote until we found it.

I watched my mom get loaded into a cop car. I still remember it so, so clearly. What she was wearing, how she looked. I was happy she wasn’t dead -- I’d been really afraid of that. At the same time, my mom was going to jail. And it felt like… I’d felt for a while that my mom had chosen the First Order over me. Had chosen Plutt over me. I was out and I was safe and I was glad, but at the same time, I wanted my mom. But she didn’t want me enough to come find me. She was going to jail, because she’d rather be in jail with them than somewhere safe with me. And that was hard. That was really hard.

 **Ben Organa:** I was mostly just glad that they hadn’t all died. Snoke always said we wouldn’t surrender. That we’d go out in a blaze of glory. But they didn’t, and that was a relief. I think if they had died it would’ve always felt like my fault.

 **Miles Statura:** It went fairly well, all things considered. We didn’t lose any officers, only one injury. There’d been a lot of fear in the back of my mind that things would go wrong, end badly. But it didn’t happen.

Once everyone was in custody, we started combing through the property, looking for evidence. It was clear pretty quickly that Hux and Ben weren’t exaggerating Snoke’s plans. If anything, there was more to it than they knew. The list was pretty damning. I couldn’t believe he was in the same house with it for five days, knowing we were just outside, and never destroyed it.

_The list was a list of potential First Order targets. Brendol Hux was on the list, as were Leia Organa, Han Solo, and Luke Skywalker. Bail Organa, Mon Mothma, Jyn Erso, and Amilyn Holdo were also on the list. The last entry, presumably added after his defection, was Dopheld Mitaka._

**Miles Statura:** The weapons cache was extensive. They’d been playing with explosives, not much, but there was some interest there. Books, a few rudimentary switches. Another list of targets -- Cranbrook was on that one. We were too. Sheriff’s department. We were too. I don’t know how far Snoke thought he was actually going to get, but he was prepared to keep escalating. Once he started killing, he was going to keep killing. More and more and more. Thank God he never got there.

 

**XI. The Trial**

 

_Most of the remaining First Order members pled guilty to weapons charges in exchange for testimony. Only Marnie Plutt, Roger Plutt, and Snoke himself refused the plea bargain. Marnie would be found guilty of conspiracy to commit murder and sentenced to three years in prison. Roger Plutt, Snoke’s gunman, would serve life in prison. Snoke’s case proved slightly more complex, but in the end he, too, was finally outmatched._

**Brendol Hux:** Jamie Shelton was the prosecutor -- he’d replaced me in Lenawee County, a good man. I liked him quite a bit. Xigena Phasma worked on the case as well -- her daughter Titania was on the team that handled Snoke’s appeal. Very good lawyers in that family.

And Poe, of course. Poe was invaluable. He won’t admit it. But he was.

_[Image: Poe Dameron and Ben Organa, Christmas 1998]_

**Poe Dameron:** I couldn’t let it go. Ben was out and Ben was safe, but Ben wasn’t home. It was really hard for me, and I wasn’t ready to deal with that yet. So I pestered the D.A. instead until they found me something to do.

I wasn’t even interviewing people; I had three semesters of an undergrad at Columbia, then I dropped out. I was barely qualified to scrub toilets. But a lot of the people involved had kids, and the kids needed to be occupied while the real lawyers took statements, so that was where it started. Babysitting. But kids talk, you know? They see things, they say things. I never took formal statements, and most of the kids never gave formal statements, although one or two of them wound up speaking at trial. But they’d make a comment, I’d note it down, the next time one of the attorneys spoke to the parents, they had a new line of questioning. So it went like that.

The one thing I am really glad I did was talking to the D.A. and Sheriff Statura and a few other people about getting the kids some kind of therapy, someone to talk to. It was definite they’d seen a lot. I worried about that. More with some, less with others, but overall they all needed someone to talk to. They’d seen a lot. More than their parents seemed to recognize.

 **Thomas Child:** Mr. Mitaka took me home and it was just immediately back to normal. We had chores and things. My mom kept talking about “When your father comes home.” He wasn’t coming back. I mean, he did eventually, but not for a long time. Even before he got arrested, I knew that.

Mom didn’t want to talk to the lawyers for a long time. Mr. Mitaka talked her into that. Poe was there to watch us, mostly. The kids. I had three younger siblings then, and Mom was pregnant again. Poe was really good with us. He helped me a lot. And he was easy to talk to.

I remember telling him about Kylo’s training. In retrospect, that was kind of a shitty thing to do, but I didn’t realize they were friends at the time. I think they did bring Rousse in for questioning, but it never made it into trial.

 **J.D. Rousse:** I had an interview, yeah. They were going to call me in to testify against Lyn, but then he pled out, which kind of surprised me. I didn’t think he would. Mitaka testifying surprised me, too. He’d been there from the start. I didn’t think he’d turn like that.

It was a shock to me, what they were doing, but it probably shouldn’t have been. Snoke and I had been talking about combat from the start. Of course he wanted to start a war. But I didn’t want to think about it, really. I’d just turned and walked away.

No one wants to see themselves as a coward. It took me forever to admit it. But I am a coward. I am. I saw what they were doing, sooner I think than anyone else. And I just walked away.

 **Jyn Erso:** The strange thing about all of it was how utterly Ben had disappeared from the narrative. Hux had re-emerged, finally, although that didn’t come out until after the raid on the First Order and the arrests of the remaining members. But there was nothing at all about Ben. I actually went to Leia directly, as a friend, and it took tremendous effort to get her just to acknowledge that he was safe. Not where he was or when he’d left or who was with him, but just that he was safe. Off the record. It really made me wonder what the hell had happened to him, that they’d closed ranks that tightly.

 **Jamie Shelton [Lenawee County Prosecutor, 1996-2010]:** It’s actually not that uncommon to have to go to trial without a witness, even a key one. You see it a lot in cases of abuse, where there’s a protectiveness towards the abuser, or on the other hand maybe a very great fear. Which wound up being more the case here, I think. Maybe a little of both. And then of course, there was the situation with Rey Plutt, which complicated things. But we had a very strong case without him. Both with the other witnesses and then with the physical evidence as well. I never had a doubt about it.

That said, there was a concern that the defense would subpoena Ben Organa and that he wouldn’t respond, or wouldn’t respond in time. Leia and Brendol seemed comfortably certain that he’d come if we really needed him, but you worry. And then, too, with him having taken Rey. You can argue the necessity of that, and I would’ve, and we had witnesses to all of that, but sometimes that’s all it needs to spark doubt in a jury member. Some can be very black-and-white, when it comes to legality. With the religious aspects of the case in as well… It felt a little dicey. I was always a little nervous about that. And just the trauma aspects of the case, knowing a little of the abuse Ben had suffered. It can make a witness act unpredictably, or struggle with what should be simple. There were definite concerns about Ben, about what would happen if he was called to the stand.

But it never happened. As a matter of fact, there were points where the defense tried to argue that Ben had never even been part of the First Order. Snoke lost lawyers from his team because of that. It was such a patently absurd thing to argue, with so much evidence against it. Why even bother? Obviously there was something Snoke needed to keep hidden, something no one else knew about, just the two of them. Something that would have completely sunk his defense.

I tried not to speculate on it much. It doesn’t do any good, and I had other things to occupy me. But I did wonder, from time to time, just what he’d done.

 **Marnie Plutt:** He did tell me to say that Ben wasn’t part of the First Order, yes. And that Rey wasn’t my daughter. He also told me that. Because what they were doing was so important, and they were so necessary to the future. They would be what survived of us, if we were careful. So we had to say that we had no idea who Ben was. I had to say I never had a daughter. That she wasn’t real. That the government made her up.

I wish it had been harder for me to say that. It wasn’t hard enough. It should’ve been harder, but it wasn’t.

 **Ben Organa:** When Rey and I were out, that first night, I promised her that I would take care of her until her mom was ready to take her back again. She was really afraid of going into foster care -- I guess Plutt used to threaten her with foster care, if she wasn’t doing exactly what he wanted all the time, and he’d tell her all kinds of stories about what would happen. So I promised her, specifically, that that wouldn’t happen. I wouldn’t let it happen.

I guess part of me just figured that when Rey’s mom was out of the First Order, she’d snap out of it. Away from Snoke, away from Plutt, she’d be fine again. And if it took longer than that, then at least hopefully we could talk to her, and my mom could talk to her, and we could work something out. I didn’t want Rey out of my life, not at all. I thought maybe -- I don’t know, almost like we could co-parent or something, or Rey’s mom could have visitation and then most of the time Rey would live with us, so we could take care of her.

Then my mom tells me that Rey’s mom is saying she doesn’t even have a kid. And she’s not sure what would happen if I brought Rey back. What if Rey’s mom grabs her and runs off and I never see her again? What if she just dumps her somewhere and I can’t find her? Or if it becomes a big thing with CPS and foster care and Rey goes to different people completely?

I couldn’t do it. Rey was such a good kid. She deserved so much better. Someone had to take care of her. You know, and someone had to choose her. Not put someone else above her, like Plutt or Snoke or anyone else. Someone had to choose _her_. So that’s what I did. And it was hard. I did want to go home. I absolutely did. But Rey really needed me and I couldn’t walk from that. I made a promise.

So we got an apartment, and I got a job, and I got Rey enrolled in school, and we kept moving. There wasn’t really a choice.

 **Luke Skywalker:** Leia was especially furious about it. Not just because it kept Ben out of reach, but also _because_ Ben was out of reach, and she missed him so desperately, and to see someone just discard their child like that really cut her to the bone.

There was a moment, after Marnie was finally bailed out and had returned to Jackson, where I had to step in to stop Leia going after her. Leia’s emotions were too high. She would have done something drastic. So I talked her down, got her back home. She never hated me very long anyway.

Of course, hypocrite that I am, I did talk to Marnie myself. On a few occasions. I was struck by how much she reminded me of my father. In her features, but also there was a specific kind of obstinance he had. She was very like him.

It would have made things easier, if she’d been truthful. Obviously by then she knew who we were. Skywalker is not a common name. But she chose not to make things easy. So there you are. Well, easy doesn’t exactly run in the family, I suppose. We’re all a little like that.

 **Armitage Hux:** Leia and I went to the Compound together at one point. I wanted to see the attic. It felt very important to me. Going up there -- Seeing that. You can’t imagine the way I felt. How angry I was. That he’d been trapped up there all that time. In that darkness, with Snoke. They don’t make cells that dark, but I was going to send him to the darkest one I could find. If they’d have let me lock the door myself I would’ve done it gladly. Swallowed the damn key. That’s the nice version of what I’d have liked to do to Snoke. I have worse ones. But I couldn’t do those, once the police got involved, so I meant to send him to prison for as long as I could.

_[Image: Armitage Hux and Finn Banneret, April 2000]_

Somehow they decided that meant I should have a chat with Finn, so he could thank me. Imagine that. You know, and I could have saved his father just by speaking up, but I didn’t. But he was still meant to thank me. You know, he was eight. Even I knew better than to put that guilt on him, and I was still half-crazed from it all. But I tried to be nice. Appropriately heroic.

 **Finn Banneret:** He definitely seemed a little messed up. I felt pretty bad for him, actually. I wasn’t allowed to know a whole lot about it, but I knew they’d been kidnapped, and things came out in the news that seemed pretty scary. And Snoke was his teacher! I looked at my teachers differently after that. Trying to figure out who the cult leaders were.

But Hux would check in on me sometimes and take me out to lunch or whatever. Go see a movie. Trying to make me feel better. He wasn’t good at it, but sometimes as a kid I think you appreciate those things. I liked spending time with him. He was really weird, but we wound up being good friends anyway.

 **Armitage Hux:** The trial itself didn’t start until summer. A year later -- more than, a little bit. I don’t actually remember much of it now. You go in, you sit, people talk, you stand up, you leave. Snoke didn’t look at me much until I was on the stand. Then he stared right at me the whole time. So I stared back. Fuck him, you know? He didn’t have any power over me at that point. He didn’t have any power at all.

 **Brendol Hux:** Two days, he was on the stand. Astonishing. I mean, he was so brave. As a parent, you kind of hate to see your child that brave. He never should’ve had to be. But I was very proud, as well.

 **Han Solo:** There was a point -- I don’t even remember what it was, at this point. It was something smaller than I would’ve expected. I think maybe something about Snoke working the two of them apart. So Ben would be all alone. But I couldn’t make it through. I told Leia to stay, so one of us could be there for Hux if he needed us. And I went home and had a nervous breakdown, basically.

I had Ben’s phone number. I thought about calling it a million times. I never did, in the end, but I thought about it every day. Just to hear his voice and know he was okay.

I did give it to Hux, though. Well, I figured he should have it. He’d need it at some point. So I gave it to him.

 **Ben Organa:** I tried not to follow the trial. Kind of the same as when the Compound was being raided. I tried not to see it, but some things were unavoidable.

I looked over my shoulder a lot, that summer. People always said Snoke had contacts everywhere, in the Militia and everything. So I looked over my shoulder a lot, in case.

 **Maz Kanata:** Oh, I had eyes on him. Friends in the neighborhood, that kind of thing. Not watching him from cars, TV FBI shit. Would’ve scared him worse. But if anyone bad was around, they were gone quick. Whether it was a Snoke thing or something else. Didn’t matter. I had that neighborhood wired. Ben was always safe.

 **Rey Organa:** It was hard, that summer. He’d been doing a lot better. We both had. Then Snoke’s face is everywhere, or Plutt’s, and it was hard. But we got through it.

 **Jamie Shelton:** Like I said, the evidence was there. We had great witnesses. In the end, Snoke and Plutt fell back on the usual blaming each other. Like these kinds of men do. Plutt was guilty because he’d pulled the trigger. Snoke was guilty because he told Plutt to do it. They just incriminated themselves, trying to incriminate each other. So they both went to jail. For life. I don’t know if it’s what they deserve, but at some point you have to turn it over to God and let the rest go.

_[Image: Randolph Snoke hears the verdict against him, September 2000]_

 

**XII. Aftermath**

 

_[Image: Ben and Rey Organa, February 2000]_

**Han Solo:** That last day [of the trial], I actually got a letter from Ben. I don’t know when he sent it. It wasn’t even really a letter, just a picture. Him and Rey. I think they must’ve been at the school, or something. One of the other parents probably took the picture, gave it to him. He sent it to me. It was in the mailbox when I got home, and I jumped back in the car immediately, drove over to Leia’s house so she could see it. It was a rough day for her. Snoke was in jail, but Ben was still gone, and it was rough. But I think that picture made her feel better. I know it made my damn year.

 **Armitage Hux:** I’d actually been thinking about calling Ben. Just, you know, that it was so strange. Snoke’s in jail, and Plutt, but Ben’s still out there somewhere not coming back. But then my dad called me down and it turned out Poe was sitting outside the house in his car, half-drunk and crying. So I went down and took care of him instead.

 **Poe Dameron:** I just don’t think I knew what to do with myself anymore. I left everything behind to find Ben and bring him home, and he wasn’t coming home. I had to deal with that. I didn’t know how. In retrospect, I shouldn’t have made that Hux’s problem, but he was extremely good with it. He’s one of my favorite people. It pisses him off every time I say that, but it’s true.

 **Armitage Hux:** I don’t know if any of us knew how to deal with life once the trial was over. I know I did a lot of struggling. Partially because of Ben, but also I’d been so convinced, once upon a time, that I had to be a clone of my dad. So I was going to go to law school and everything, and be just like him, and although we’d reconciled and everything I realized I’d still rather set myself on fire than go to law school. I liked the idea of engineering, as a career -- I’d always had an interest in it, but I tried going back to school and that very quickly wasn’t for me. So finally I thought to join the Navy, the Seabees, and that seemed like a very good idea. And then we went to war.

I told basically everyone who’d listen that it was fine. I was in the Navy; we weren’t really going to Afghanistan. But we were, of course. We were, and we did, and I actually did two tours over there, trying to rebuild things. While people tried to blow us up, you know. The usual.

I never worried much about survival. I do survival pretty well. But we lost people, and that was terrible. There was one incident, with an IED. I still remember that very vividly. I think almost as soon as I was back in the States I called Ben. Asked him to tell me the most mundane things he could think of. As boring as he could. It turned out Rey was getting to the age where she was about to have her first period, so he gave me this really embarrassing story about going to Planned Parenthood for pamphlets, and how he had all these pads and tampons and things in a cupboard waiting, and just on and on. I hate to admit it, but it actually helped a lot. And it was what I asked for. Very mundane. Sometimes you need those things to function.

 **Ben Organa:** Hux called about once a year. Not, like every twelve months, he’d call. But he called once in 2001, in 2002, in 2003. There was one year he called twice, apparently. I had a car accident -- we’d moved out of town to this little place in the country, and we were driving home and it was icy. I hit a tree. Hux called that night, while I was in the hospital knocked out on painkillers, and he talked to Rey. Then he called me a few days later to check up on me.

 **Rey Organa:** He sang Journey songs to me. Which was pretty weird, in retrospect, but it was actually deeply comforting at the time. Hux singing “Don’t Stop Believing” to me. I didn’t even know he knew that song. Maybe he’d been watching _Glee_.

 **Ben Organa:** Chewie was in the hospital that night, too, I remember. I woke up and he was there, talking to Maz. I saw him a few times, checking in on us. I don’t know how he thought he was being sneaky. I mean, he’s taller than me, and I can’t hide for anything.

 **Charles Gasco:** Han had this thing where he didn’t want to go up north for fear of running into the kids. I don’t know if I totally understood it. But I figured it didn’t apply to me, and it’s not like I was going to just avoid my whole family for however long. So I’d go up to visit, and if I happened to see Ben in the grocery store and follow him around for a few minutes, well… [laughter].

I really did think I’d gotten away with it, though. That’s funny. All that time, I figured I was spying on him, and him knowing all about it. Well, that’s what happens when you’re a seven-foot Indian. People notice you.

 **Han Solo:** For myself, for Leia, we really did just kind of wait. It may not have looked like it from the outside. We had our jobs -- she went back to taking clients and being in politics, I went back to making furniture -- and sometimes we were together and sometimes we weren’t. We did things. We didn’t just hide in our houses; we had some kind of semblance of normal lives. But the part of our lives where we were parents, where we had a son -- that part got put on pause for a long time.

We felt it every day. It wasn’t something we talked about much, but we knew. Every day, we felt it.

 **Brendol Hux:** You do what you can to help. It isn’t much, though. Ben would come back when the time was right for him, not for anyone else, and there wasn’t anything I could do to fix it.

Finn was a little easier. Not much; he’d lost his dad, and he’d lose his mom, and there was no replacing that. Especially not by myself and Lucy. But we were there for him, when we could be. Hux did more, but he was overseas for a while, and then when he came back he was stationed in California. So we’d take him to lunch or do things with him. Poe did too, as I recall. And Leia, of course. She had such a reputation for being a battleaxe, and she was in a lot of ways, but God she could be tender when she chose to.

 **Finn Banneret:** Everyone really did try to help take care of me. My grandmother was the biggest part of that, and the best, but it was nice to have those other people involved, too. Hux especially. It was always a big deal when he was on leave and he’d come visit. Every time he left I made him promise me he wouldn’t get killed. He’d roll his eyes, but he’d do it.

The bomb thing was pretty intense. Out of all of it, I’d say that was the worst. That he still went back again just floored me. But Hux was like that. He definitely gets afraid sometimes, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen him afraid for himself. Just other people.

 **Thomas Child:** I remember after the trial, Poe tried to check in on us again and my mom wouldn’t let him in. And this was still before Dad got out of jail. After that was a lot worse. It felt in a lot of ways like they never really left the First Order. And my mom had left before things got that bad, but I guess in her head, a lot of that stuff still held true. We had to pray for Snoke at night. Or “the martyrs,” which was the same thing.

Mitaka, we weren’t allowed to see him either. Or Des, which was hard because we grew up together. But then we were both in high school, we had some computer access, so that made things easier. We were MySpace friends. We had Facebook. Someone had the idea to start a Facebook group so all of us could talk, and that helped.

 **Desiree Mitaka:** I set up the Children of the First Order group, yeah. I think there were about twelve of us. Thomas’s younger siblings weren’t involved, and a couple of other kids weren’t either, but most of us were. Hux was, even though he’d been eighteen. Ben and Rey weren’t, for obvious reasons. We had to have a few conversations about Finn, mostly because we didn’t want to -- it’s hard to explain, but I think we felt pretty responsible, for what had happened to his dad. Even though we weren’t; our parents were, but. But I finally invited him, and he joined, and it was nice, actually. I felt like we were all pretty good friends.

He used to give me shit for going to [Michigan] State. Because he was going to U of M [University of Michigan]. That was fun, actually. Picking on each other like that. Then I dropped out, but.

And that was right around when Ben and Rey came back. Snoke’s appeal and everything.

 

**XIII. The Appeal**

 

_In April of 2012, almost thirteen years after his arrest, Snoke announced he would be seeking a new trial. He claimed that, had Ben Organa testified, he would have been exonerated. People who knew the case were stunned._

**Jamie Shelton:** It was his idea in the first place! The whole time, Ben wasn’t part of the First Order. Ben didn’t know anything. There was no Kylo Ren. There was no Rey Plutt. I mean, come on.

We couldn’t fathom it. I went out to lunch with Miles and Xigena that day, just to talk about it. We couldn’t figure it out. We were floored.

 **Miles Statura:** We had hours and hours of tape from witnesses talking about what he did to Ben. Everyone said there was worse that only Ben knew. And now this guy’s saying that Ben’s testimony would exonerate him? Pardon my language, but what a load of horseshit.

 **Finn Banneret:** I was terrified when I heard. I knew, vaguely, that Ben hadn’t fallen off the planet. That people knew where he was and he had a phone and Hux called him sometimes. But all those “what ifs” started coming into my head, and I freaked out. So I called Hux, because that’s what I do when I freak out, I guess.

 **Armitage Hux:** I heard it from Finn, first. So I reached out to Leia. By the time I talked to her, she’d already heard back from Ben, so that was good. I got permission to tell Finn, and then I called him back, to tell him not to worry.

It was a bit of a hard moment, though. I trusted Ben to do his job, to keep Snoke in prison. But I was very resentful of the universe for dragging him back into this. I liked knowing he was safe and peaceful, and now he was going to have to live it all over again, because the only other option was letting Snoke walk free. I was bitter about that for a long while.

 **Ben Organa:** I was at work when my mom called me. She hadn’t called me at all, ever -- the one time we spoke, I called her at her office. So I knew it had to be serious. She said Snoke was calling for a new trial. That he wanted me to testify. That I would probably be subpoenaed, but she’d help me fight if I wanted to.

It wasn’t really a choice. I didn’t want him out of prison. I wanted him locked up forever, so I was going to do what I had to do. But it was still hard.

Rey was about to graduate; she was already eighteen. There wasn’t a really compelling reason for us to stay in hiding anymore, and she’d been accepted to U of M, which wasn’t that far from my parents. We’d been talking about maybe starting to go back to who we’d been. So it wasn’t something we were against doing, but I still would’ve liked for it to be our choice. It just didn’t turn out that way.

But I think part of me always knew I’d have to finish this. That I couldn’t hide forever.

It was all right. I was strong enough by then. I was still afraid of him; I _am_ still afraid of him, even now. But I was strong enough that I knew fear wouldn’t stop me.

 **Rey Organa:** It was never a question of whether or not Ben was going to go. I knew he would, immediately. But he wanted me to stay home and focus on finishing my senior year, and I had to explain to him a few different times that that wasn’t going to happen. I knew I couldn’t go into the deposition with him or anything, but every time he went downstate, I was going with him. It took him a little bit to accept that, but he got there.

 **Han Solo:** I had my ideas of how it would go [seeing Ben again], yeah. My little fantasies. They didn’t involve Snoke, necessarily, but at some point you get over it. I got to see my son again. Nothing else really matters.

The night he came back… Words don’t describe it. He was there, he was… He was huge, I remember noticing that. I was terrified. He was terrified. I touched his face. He had stubble. He was an adult but he was still my son. That hadn’t changed.

 **Ben Organa:** It’s hard to talk about. Not… But just finding the words for it. Seeing my parents again. I’d missed them so much.

_[Image: Han Solo, Ben Organa, Rey Organa, and Leia Organa, at Rey’s graduation, June 2012]_

**Han Solo:** Suddenly I was a dad again. And not just Ben, but now there’s Rey to think about too, with her own story and her own baggage and her own things that she needs. And not that I’m her dad, necessarily, but obviously we needed to take care of the two of them. Leia and me, we had a lot of ground to make up. There was a lot we missed. But we were so ready.

The first thing was making sure Ben was being protected and looked after during the whole process. That was mostly Leia, I’d say.

 **Poe Dameron:** [Titania] Phasma was the one who called me [about serving as Ben’s advocate]. I told her I’d think about it, and then I called Leia and talked to her for a while. The ethical concerns were there. Because I’d known Ben for so long, and the case had done so much to me already. Obviously, I was working as his advocate, not his adversary. It doesn’t look like so much of a conflict up front. But making sure he testified, that he got the whole story out, that he was truthful even when it hurt -- that does go against the need to protect, sometimes. And I’d always been very protective of Ben. Even after seeing him for the first time, obviously grown, obviously not a little kid anymore, I still worried about that kicking in, making me less effective.

But it worked. The first time he and I sat down with Phasma and started going over things, it was very clear that this was going to work.

 **Titania Phasma [Lenawee County Assistant District Attorney, 2008 - present]:** It was either the first or second meeting that he said “It’s not like he [Snoke] molested me.” And I looked at Poe, and Poe looked at me. We’d both dealt with sexual abuse cases. We both knew what that meant.

We’d already worked with Leia and everyone else on getting Ben a therapist, which was good. Because he definitely needed one.

 **Ben Organa:** It was the first time I’d really talked to anyone about it all. I couldn’t talk to Hux -- not because of him, you understand, but because of me, and how I was at the time. I obviously wasn’t going to talk to Rey, who was a little kid at the time. My parents -- I mean, over the phone, that didn’t feel right. No one else knew who I really was. I was this whole other person, Ben Keller. This new identity thing again, which I guess I just sort of kept doing. And Ben Organa stayed locked away for a long time.

It was very painful. Necessary, probably. A lot of pain is like that. Like cleaning out a wound. It hurts but you have to do it.

It hurt, though. And there were a lot of things, a lot of words I hadn’t associated with myself that suddenly were going to apply. _Victim._ No one likes that, I think. No one wants to be a victim; you want to be strong. _Abuse_ , obviously. That’s a hard one. That’s, you know. For other people who’ve really suffered. A lot of things like that that I had to suddenly reconcile as being a part of me. Of my identity.

And I think in general I just hadn’t realized how much I’d boxed up and locked away until I started looking at it again. How much had seemed very normal and now didn’t at all. Some of it didn’t really seem real. It was, and sometimes it became real in this very visceral way that’s hard to describe. I don’t want to say I had flashbacks; that seems way too far, but definitely there were some very, very strong memories. At the same time, it felt like I had to be making it up, because who do these things happen to, in real life? It felt very impossible, even when I knew it wasn’t. I remember telling my therapist that the more I tried to tell the truth the more it felt like lying. Because none of those seemed like things that could’ve happened to me. They were, and they did, but --

But like I said, I think a lot of that was that kind of reconciling. Coming to terms with the fact that I was still Ben Organa and who that was and what had happened to him and what it all meant.

Sometimes I just wanted to sit with my head on my mom’s shoulder all day and not do anything else. Sometimes I wanted to just be back home in Cross Village and work in the garden and split wood and bake or whatever. The kind of nice thing about driving back and forth was that I did get to do both, at least at first. Because we weren’t going to move for good until Rey had graduated, so I would be downstate for the weekends and then we’d come back up and I had that time to reorient myself. Because I wasn’t going to put aside who I’d been since the First Order, either. All of the things that had happened from there had really happened. And who I’d been as Ben Keller was also who I was. That was in a lot of ways the best parts of me. I wasn’t going to lose any of that. I just had to make space for the rest of me, too.

 **Jonette Armstrong [friend of Rey Organa]:** Rey and I were in kindergarten together. We’d been friends forever, pretty much. Even when she moved to Cross Village and started going to Harbor [Springs High School], we were still best friends. We were each other’s prom dates and everything. She wasn’t gay; I was but she wasn’t. But we wanted to go to each other’s proms, so we just went as dates.

Then Rey calls the week after senior prom and says she has something to tell me. That it’s going to be in the paper, but she wants me to hear it from her first.

I was really surprised, yeah. My mom actually wasn’t. She recognized Ben from the news, but I was a little kid; I didn’t pay attention. Mom never told anyone about it, but I guess people knew. People who’d known his father, or just paid attention to things, they knew. But they let it go, mostly. Just kept an eye on him and Rey, and let them get on with their lives.

It’s weird to be in the middle of a secret like that and not know. I wasn’t angry at anyone, but it was really weird.

Actually, I take that back. I was mad at Rey’s mom. They’d always said they had a good mom, and she’d died, but it turned out Rey’s mom had just disowned her, and I was so mad about that. I couldn’t believe it, when I heard. I still have a hard time with that one.

But Rey’s still part of my family, so hopefully that makes up for it.

 **Mon Mothma:** We let ourselves be scooped by the Petoskey News-Review! It wasn’t even just that they got there first. I knew Leia, and Brendol, and Miles. I knew everyone involved. But Ben wasn’t going to talk to me about it until he’d talked to them, because that was his community and his home, and had been for several years. And I do have a heart sometimes.

So it was in the Petoskey News-Review before it was in the Free Press. I think we had a little article about Snoke’s appeal, with no mention of Ben in it. They had a front page spread that Thursday, then another one Friday. They did a whole series, actually, for a week or so. Very well written, too. I thought they did terrific work. Lovely and human.

And they let us borrow the writer for a piece much later on, when the appeals court was about to reach the verdict. So in the end I don’t really regret it. But it’s still kind of funny to me, getting scooped by this tiny little paper. But that’s how it is sometimes.

 **Finn Banneret:** I reached out to Poe and told him I wanted to meet Ben, to thank him. I’d read the [Petoskey News-Review] articles, actually -- someone had them all up on Facebook, so I read them -- and it had really hit me, how much he was giving up. So I wanted to touch base and let him know how grateful I was. Poe said Ben was fine with meeting, but that Rey insisted on being there for it. I think she was feeling protective. Hard to blame her.

 **Rey Organa:** It was mostly because I couldn’t help any other way. I couldn’t be there when he was being interviewed or giving statements or anything. So I was going to be there any other time I could. But I think I was also worried that Finn was going to blame Ben, somehow. Probably just because I’d seen how much Ben blamed himself. And then also I sort of blamed myself, because Plutt was my father, so it was this very tangled mess of guilt.

And then Finn was the nicest person, and I was embarrassed that I’d been so worried in the first place. But obviously it worked out.

_[Finn Banneret and Rey Organa on the campus of U of M, August 2012]_

**Ben Organa:** It was pretty funny, actually. They made eye contact the first time and that was it. They were both gone. But they were so careful about it for so long. Finn would take her to U of M for a campus tour, and they’d actually tour the campus. Or he’d want to show her a good restaurant for lunch, and they’d eat lunch. And that was it! This very careful thing that they were doing. I think they might have held hands once or twice. It was ridiculous, but it was so sweet. And very funny, obviously.

I wasn’t talking with Hux at that point. He was worried it might be seen as him tampering with my testimony, or us colluding on it, so I couldn’t tell him anything. I wound up writing him these letters and just keeping them in a file on my computer until it was all over and I could send them. And I did, too. His response was “Oh my god.” Just like that, three words.

 **Armitage Hux:** Directed at him, mostly. Honestly, he’s like a gossipy old aunt sometimes. I guess he needed the distraction.

It was hard, though. I wanted so badly to know how he was doing. But I couldn’t ask anyone. I was too afraid. One of the things we talked about after -- not just Ben and myself, but all of us really -- was how easy it was to slip back into thinking of Snoke as Supreme Leader again. Like, maybe he really could do this impossible thing. Maybe he really could get out and walk free again. And then what? There were still some people out there in the First Order. Thomas’s parents were. It felt very much like Marnie Plutt still was, although now I guess she wasn’t. But he’d always said the cult was bigger than we knew. That there was more going on than we could see. I mean, I’d always thought it was just a school bible study, and then there’s this compound in the middle of nowhere, all these people. It didn’t seem that far-fetched that there were more of them out there, maybe. Waiting.

 **Thomas Child:** I was worried my dad would do something. I’d moved out by then, so I had no way of knowing what he was doing, what he was saying. Jeff wasn’t at school, so he didn’t have a computer to use, and they weren’t allowed to have phones. So I went to the police, and I asked them to please please just keep an eye on my dad, and make sure he didn’t do anything stupid. I don’t know if they ever did.

 **Titania Phasma:** There were a few people that court staff had pictures of, names of. Just in case. They stepped up patrols around Leia’s house, around Poe’s apartment. My house, of course. So it was taken seriously, although I don’t blame anyone for worrying. And especially not Thomas.

 **Ben Organa:** Rey was very worried about someone coming to hurt me. I was more worried about what was in my own head. It felt -- it’s hard to explain, but I felt sometimes like this switch was going to just flip, and then I’d be Kylo Ren again. And I wouldn’t be able to testify. I’d just say what Snoke wanted me to say, be what he wanted me to be. I’d be helpless.

He’d gotten into me so deeply. There was still a little fragment of him there. It was small, and I had control over it, but I was very afraid that a day would come that I did not, and it would start to grow again.

Especially when they said Snoke would be present for the deposition.

 **Titania Phasma:** Our primary argument was that, if Ben had been called as witness for the original trial, he likely would not have been forced to share the courtroom with his abuser. If Ben had been called as witness for the original trial, he may not have been made to testify in open court at all. He was sixteen. The presiding judge might very well have heard his testimony in private, with the lawyers and a court recorder and a bailiff and no one else there. If the aim was to give Snoke the trial he would’ve had with Ben there, that doesn’t necessarily grant him the right to several hours in a small room with his victim. We wanted Ben to have a deposition without Snoke in attendance, and we wanted the deposition sealed. That’s ideally what he would’ve had in 2000. That was what we thought he deserved in 2012.

It was a long shot. We knew that going in. But it would have been unconscionable not to try. What Ben was doing was tremendously difficult. It was our job to offer him as much protection as we could. Most of that fell on Poe, naturally. But I did what I could.

 **Ben Organa:** Phasma was great. I really liked her. She’s very, very tough. She asked a lot of hard questions. But she wanted me to be ready for anything, and that was what it took. I knew she wasn’t just being cruel for no reason. I’d been through that. This wasn’t it.

The last few weeks were very hard. I went through a lot in my head, leading up to it. But people were there for me. Poe, Rey, my parents, my uncles. Lots of people. I wasn’t alone. That was Snoke’s big thing, when I was Kylo Ren. Isolating me from everyone. What saved me then was Hux. Now I had an army, and I knew it. That helped a lot.

 **Titania Phasma:** In the end, the deposition was a complete farce, of course. Nothing at all came up that would’ve exonerated Snoke. Nothing in the slightest. His lawyers said after that their goal was to force Ben to confront how ridiculous his story was. I’m sorry, but that’s horseshit. Sneering as you ask questions is not a legal strategy. Snoke genuinely just wanted to relive the worst of the abuse. He wanted to make Ben relive it as well. That’s the truth, and I stand behind that 100%. Classic abuser behavior. And in the end the courts enabled it.

 **Poe Dameron:** It wasn’t the first time I’ve been in that situation with a client. It won’t be the last. It stands out because it was so unique in a lot of ways, but at the same time it’s really distressingly common. The system just doesn’t work the way we’d like it to sometimes.

We got through it. In the end, that’s all I can let myself care about.

 **Ben Organa:** I don’t really remember most of it, if I’m honest. I think I had to let myself switch off one last time. Go be somewhere else. I’ve seen bits and pieces of it -- not much, but [the recording of the deposition] was in pretty heavy rotation for a while, so I couldn’t really avoid it. It’s surreal to say the least. I don’t entirely recognize myself in it.

Poe took me out to dinner after. Then he took me home. He stayed over; we crashed in the living room. Sometimes we did that, on really bad days. Then I got up in the morning, sat with my mom for a while. When other people started to wake up, I made breakfast. We had waffles. She had this belgian waffle maker she never used. I loved that thing. We had a pretty quiet day, and then we had a pretty quiet week, and life resumed.

 _Snoke’s appeal was denied in October of 2012. Ben had confronted his Supreme Leader and had won. Less than a year later, Snoke was dead_.

 **Ben Organa:** I didn’t know how to feel about it [Snoke’s appeal being denied]. I remember hyperventilating, a little. Then I just broke down. I think I was too tired to do much of anything else. The process took a lot out of me. Poe was with me. Thank God for that.

 **Finn Banneret:** It was relief for me, mostly. I trusted Ben to do the right thing, but it wasn’t just up to him. The judges had to listen, and I was worried they wouldn’t. It was a huge relief that they did. It felt like everything could start back up again. We weren’t waiting any longer.

 **Dopheld Mitaka:** I didn’t follow it that closely -- there were other things going on for me at the time. But I knew enough to know that Ben had finally beaten Snoke, and I was glad for that. The details came out later, and then I started to wonder if anyone had won at all. But at the time, it felt like a little bit of justice.

 **Desiree Mitaka:** One of the things the adults would say when we were in the First Order was that we should be strong like Kylo Ren. Be brave like Kylo Ren. My dad never said that, but other people’s parents did. Thomas’s dad said it a lot. That was a thing in the Facebook group for a while, after the deposition and everything. “Be strong like Kylo Ren.”

The best part, probably, was that with the deposition over, Hux came up to visit, and we had a little reunion. The adults didn’t come. The adults weren’t really invited. But Hux and Poe and Ben were there, and most of us from Facebook. Finn, of course.

And I got to see Rey again. That was huge. Ben had taken over braiding her hair. He was better at it than me. I was kind of mad at him for that.

_[Image: Patience Lynch, Rey Organa, and Desiree Mitaka, November 2012. Ben Organa is visible in the background.]_

**Thomas Child:** We had so many questions. Where they’d been, what they’d been doing. Ben had come out as gay -- I remember that being kind of a big thing. Someone asked if he’d been dating Hux. I think that might have been Patience [Lynch]. He was really good about it.

Rey had visited her mom. I remember that. I remember being kind of jealous. I hadn’t seen my parents for a year at that point. We still don’t talk.

 **Marnie Plutt:** It was a long time before I started to see things clearly. Luke was a big part of that. I don’t know why he didn’t give up on me. He just didn’t. I wasn’t sure about seeing Rey again -- at a certain point I decided she was better without me. But I owed her the chance to make that call for herself, instead of me doing it for her. I thought that was the best way.

We don’t talk much. We do talk sometimes. She knows how proud I am of her. I don’t understand everything of what she does, but I love my daughter, and I’m very proud of her. And I’m glad I got to tell her that.

_[Image: Rey Organa and Marnie Plutt at the Detroit Women’s March, January 2017]_

**Rey Organa:** It was hard. I still have a lot of questions that she can’t really answer. I get angry about things sometimes. But it’s better than it was.

 **Ben Organa:** I remember worrying if I was going to see Poe much after [the deposition] was over. I guess that was kind of a stupid thing to worry about.

 **Poe Dameron:** When we were working on the case, we were working on the case. But there were times when we weren’t, when we’d just spend time together, and that was so good. I remember going up north for Rey’s graduation and just spending time at their house. There were bonfires, and it was just… I mean I was in trouble. Very, very deep trouble. I absolutely wanted to say goodbye to everything and just live in that little house and steal his flannel shirts and play guitar while he cooked. That obviously wasn’t in the cards for us. But we found another way to do it.

 **Finn Banneret:** I liked everything about Rey. From the moment I met her, I liked everything about her. But she was just starting U of M, and there was a lot going on, and it felt like I just needed to wait, so I did. It was worth the wait, though.

 **Rey Organa:** There’s a definite existential weirdness to the whole thing. My stepdad killed his dad. It’s weird. But love is weird, sometimes. Doesn’t mean it’s not worth it.

 **Han Solo:** For a while you wake up every morning and it’s this great happy ending. Me being me, I was always waiting for the other shoe to drop. Knew it would, eventually. That’s how life is.

 

**XIV. “Snoke Was Right:” 2016 - Now**

 

_[Image: Leia Organa campaigns in Northville, Michigan, August 2016]_

**Jyn Erso:** In 2015, Leia made the choice to run for public office again. Her district had flip-flopped pretty wildly over the years. It was hard to say where things would land. But she’d become this beloved figure over the years, and her opponent [Gary Wisemore] really struggled after the primaries. And then, too, she had both Huxes on her campaign, which was a pretty big switch.

 **Brendol Hux:** I hadn’t quite left the Republican party before that, but obviously between the two there wasn’t really a contest. It just wasn’t the same party anymore. Even before Trump, it had changed too much. Or I’d changed, or both.

Leia was my best friend. She was a good, ethical, brilliant person. I thought she’d do an amazing job. I was in before Armitage, honestly.

 **Armitage Hux:** I started off just volunteering here and there. But her campaign manager was an idiot. Lando did what he could, but he was busy with other campaigns. I thought my dad should do it, but he said he thought I should, so I stepped in. We had some terrific young staffers -- Rose and Paige Tico among them -- and with that and with the advice we got from veterans like my dad and Lando and [Amilyn] Holdo, we ran a really great campaign. No dirty tricks, nothing anyone would be ashamed of. Just a good campaign.

And we won.

And then everything went to shit.

_[Image: Donald Trump celebrates his election as President of the United States, November 2016]_

**Jyn Erso:** I’d never seen the air sucked out of a room that fast. One minute, it was a celebration. The next it was a funeral.

 **Lando Calrissian:** You cannot tell me a thousand voters -- over a thousand, honestly, if you look at the numbers -- chose Leia Organa to represent them and then turned right around and voted for Donald Trump. I get cognitive dissonance. I get hypocrisy. But that’s too much. That’s too much.

We should’ve had a recount. It’s obscene to me that we didn’t get it.

 **Armitage Hux:** One minute you’re planning for all these wonderful things you’d hoped to accomplish. The next, you realize it’s going to be a fight just to hold ground. To not backslide too far.

We took a day. And then we met and we regrouped and we looked at the work we were going to have to put in to protect this state and our country for the next two years, and we started divvying it up. Started to get it done. Because that’s what the campaign was, who we were. Who Leia was. It wasn’t about glory. It was about the work. And if the work gets harder, then that’s what it is.

If it was too much for her, she never said. But honestly, I don’t think she knew. I think everything felt normal until it wasn’t, and then it was already too late.

_In late December of 2016, Leia Organa suffered a heart attack._

**Ben Organa:** I was making dinner. I called her for… I don’t even remember what, anymore. But she didn’t answer. That wasn’t like her. She always answered when I called. I remember her saying that, distinctly. That she would always answer when I called. I called again. Nothing. So then I called Hux.

 **Armitage Hux:** We were both in the office, getting some things done. I know she was working on her speech for the Women’s March [in Detroit]. I can’t remember what I was doing. Ben called, and asked me to check on her. Said she wasn’t answering her phone, and I knew that was unlike her. So I went in her office, and she was just…

Sorry. This is hard.

I called 911, had them on speakerphone while I was doing chest compressions. Color started to come back. She was breathing. Her heart was beating. I thought it was enough. The paramedics came and took her to hospital and I thought we’d have a rough night or two and she’d wake up and she’d be fine. Because her heart was beating. She was breathing.

But she didn’t wake up. She couldn’t keep breathing on her own. She would and then she’d stop. Her heart would go a bit and then it wouldn’t. It felt very much like she was trying as hard as she could to live, but her body was just going against her.

She was in hospital three days. The third day, we all said goodbye. Ben said I could be there, if I wanted, for the end of it. But I didn’t have the strength. I just sat in the waiting room with my dad, and just cried.

I loved her so very much. Losing her like that was devastating. Just devastating.

_[Image: Armitage Hux, Brendol Hux, and Lando Calrissian announce the death of Leia Organa, December 2016]_

**Han Solo:** I never loved anyone in the world the way I loved her. There was never anyone else and I doubt there ever will be.

But you carry on. She would have murdered us if we hadn’t. I don’t know how, but she would’ve done it.

 **Poe Dameron:** Ben and I had just rescheduled our wedding for Inauguration Day. She’d mentioned it as a joke, so she wouldn’t have to be in Washington. So she’d have an excuse. But Ben figured it would be a good “Fuck you” to Trump, not to mention Pence, and I certainly wasn’t opposed. And then Leia was gone, and we had to decide whether or not to go through with it. It was really hard. I remember saying at one point that Leia would come back to kill us both if we didn’t have the wedding like we’d planned, and Ben just looked at me and asked, “You think she could?” Actually hopeful. Like she really could.

In the end, we went ahead with it. Which I think was the best call. But it was so hard. I remember our last fitting, for our tuxes, just having a complete breakdown. Han was fixing Ben’s tie, and Leia wasn’t there to see it, and she wouldn’t see the wedding, and that was it. It was over. And I just lost it.

 **Luke Skywalker:** It was what we needed, I think. I don’t remember thinking of it in that context at the time. Leia was my twin -- we took our first breaths together, and now I was trying to breathe without her and everything felt so impossible for those first few weeks. I was trying to write something for the wedding, and I just couldn’t. And then I was standing there, in front of all those people, and Ben and Poe there in their suits, and it was the easiest thing in the world. Because Leia was still there. Leia hadn’t gone anywhere. She was in every single person in that room. She would be with us as long as we kept fighting. And when I saw that, when I felt that, then I could breathe again. And the world brightened.

 **Ben Organa:** The moment for me was the day after, at the Women’s March. I was standing behind Rey, and there were all these signs with my mom’s face on them, just this sea of them. The feeling of that -- I can’t describe it. It hurt and I was glad and there was a resolution to keep fighting. All these things at once.

_[Image: A tweet by Owen Marten (@owenisowinning), showing the marriage of Ben Organa and Poe Dameron. Text reads: Shame to see how this young man has lost his way, and how this country has lost its way. #snokewasright #decayofanation #draintheswamp]_

_That same day, Owen Marten announced he would be running in the special election for Leia Organa’s House seat by tweeting a picture of Ben and Poe’s wedding with the hashtag #snokewasright_

**Armitage Hux:** I saw that, and I thought -- “Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me.” I’d already made up my mind to run before that, but even if I hadn’t, I would’ve done so just for spite.

And then Ben goes on Colbert, which shows you how angry he was about it. First he livestreams his wedding, and now he’s on Colbert.

 **Ben Organa:** Oh, I was furious. At the same time, it was almost comical. The tweet before was “Blue Lives Matter.” The tweet after was “Blue Lives Matter.” And then in the middle, “Snoke was right?” I was floored. And obviously someone at Colbert was, too. They reached out to me so quickly. Which I hadn’t have expected at all. I didn’t think that many people outside of Michigan even knew about it. Then I’m in New York about to walk out in front of an audience. Completely surreal.

I was glad, after, that I don’t have any kind of social media. Facebook or anything like that. And don’t get me wrong, most people were very supportive and kind. But there’s always that one group of people who have to be assholes just for sport.

_[Image: Ben Organa and Stephen Colbert, January 2017]_

**Jyn Erso:** That tweet right there was the beginning and end of Owen Marten’s campaign. He didn’t drop out, but he might as well have. [Armitage Hux won with 83% of the vote]. But that hashtag refused to die. The QAnons latched on to it like a holy grail. Suddenly you have First Order Truthers. It’s all crisis actors. It’s CIA plants. And because the case was always this semi-obscure thing, other people got sucked in. Started believing it.

 **Dopheld Mitaka:** One of my coworkers came up to me and gave me this sticker. _Snoke Was Right_. And I lost it. I don’t shout at people. I was screaming. My manager tried to tell me, “Oh, it’s just politics, calm down.” And I told him that I’d been in the First Order. That I’d testified against Snoke. That he damn near ruined my life. And he looked at me, and then he asked, “What’s the First Order?”

 **Thomas Child:** I’ve been told I couldn’t have been in the First Order. That it wasn’t real. Or that it was too long ago; I’m not old enough. My sister was born into the First Order. She’s eighteen now. It wasn’t that long ago. And it did happen. I was there. I saw the whole thing. It happened. It happened to real people. Not crisis actors. Not plants.

I lost my family to this. I still don’t talk to my parents. I still don’t talk to my sisters. I barely talk to my brother. The things I saw, the things that people went through… It is the most insulting thing for people to say it’s all some big lie. And yet we hear it every day.

 **Jyn Erso:** “Snoke Was Right” bumper stickers. Hats. T-shirts. I’m waiting for the day Trump tweets it. I’m surprised he hasn’t yet. But I’m sure it’s coming. He does use #decayofanation already. I’ve seen that a few times.

 **Ben Organa:** All we can do is just keep proving him wrong. Day after day after day. That’s what I think every time I see that, which fortunately isn’t much. Snoke was wrong. And I’m living proof of that.

 

**XV. What We Learned**

 

 **Armitage Hux:** Don’t wait for someone else to do something about it. There isn’t going to be anyone else. Do it yourself or it won’t get done.

 **Brendol Hux:** The moment you decide to treat others as less than human is the moment you become a monster yourself. Everyone around you is human. Everyone around you deserves respect. Even if they’ve made mistakes. Treat people like humans. Treat them with respect. That’s how you stay human yourself.

 **Dopheld Mitaka:** I would say… That you don’t get to stop doing the right thing just because you tried once and maybe got halfway there. It’s not a one-time thing. It’s an ongoing process, something you work at for the rest of your life. And you’re never doing as much as you want to believe, either.

 **Rey Organa:** That there’s hope. Even in the dark times. There’s hope, if you reach for it.

 **Luke Skywalker:** Kids don’t just absorb the lessons you want to teach them. Everything you say, everything you do is teaching them something. So be very, very clear what you want to teach.

 **Marnie Plutt:** If you love your children let them grow. Don’t try to shrink them back down. Let them grow.

 **Poe Dameron:** Two things, I think. First is that sometimes you can fight and not win, and you can win and not feel like you’ve won, and that’s all right. It doesn’t mean the work wasn’t worth it. It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have tried, or that good won’t come of your efforts in the end. It just doesn’t always feel like you want it to. That’s how life is.

And second is just listen to kids. They see things you don’t realize they’re seeing. They know things we’d prefer they don’t. Listen to them. Hear them out. And then act. That’s how you protect them.

 **Kes Dameron:** Terrible things happen. What matters is how you respond to them. That’s what shows your character.

 **J.D. Rousse:** It’s easy to try to make yourself the hero in everything. The hardest thing is to acknowledge that you’re on the wrong side. But you have to. And then you have to do something about it. I’m good at the first. Not so great at the second.

 **Finn Banneret:** Love is stronger than hate. Always. Even if it seems sometimes like it isn’t.

 **Han Solo:** Don’t try to protect other people from how you feel. It doesn’t end well. Talk to them. Be open.

 **Maz Kanata:** Keep the door open. If someone’s in need, let them in.

 **Jonette Armstrong:** The best part of us is the part that sees a stranger and asks “How do I help?”

 **Charles Gasco:** Never trust a white man who promises to save you from yourself.

 **Desiree Mitaka:** You’re stronger than the people who’ve hurt you.

 **Lando Calrissian:** In order for justice to be done, we have to acknowledge that a crime has been committed. Until we acknowledge our crimes, as a country, we will never know true justice or true freedom.

 **Jyn Erso:** Never underestimate the capability of the human race for denial.

 **Mon Mothma:** There’s this idea that life is like a tv show -- we learn a lesson once and then never have to learn it again. But the truth I think is that it’s a lot harder than that, more repetitive. Most mistakes will get made over and over again. Hopefully someday we can stop.

 **Miles Statura:** I don’t know what the lesson is, honestly. I don’t know if there is one.

 **Jamie Shelton:** Justice will come. It isn’t always simple; it isn’t always smooth. But it will come.

 **Titania Phasma:** Justice isn’t something that just happens. You have to be willing to put in the work. And God, if you find someone who is willing to do the work, do everything in your power to smooth the way for them, because it will not be easy.

 **Ben Organa:** It’s easy to say that the world is ending, because it gives you an excuse not to care. Not to fight. But that’s why it’s so important to realize that the world isn’t ending. It’s still here. As long as we’re willing to keep fighting, it always will be.

Don’t give up that easy. Don’t give up at all.

**Author's Note:**

> Also, I've been batting around the idea of supplemental materials/sidebar articles for this story. If I do go that route, they'll be added as supplemental chapters later.


End file.
